July 1st -- Canada Day, Lady Diana's birthday, the day for massive marches in Hong Kong, and if I remember right, my own birthday as well. (Don't ask how old I am; I stopped counting.) My first birthday at home in America in years. Posts may be sparse as I have to spend time with the family, but I'll try to slip off and blog whenever I get the chance. To my friends in HK, have a great time at the march.

To my friends in the US, remember, friends don't let friends vote Republican. That's what you can get me for my birthday -- talk someone you love into voting for Kerry. Thanks.

Talk about a bombshell. Of course, it's a Drudge "exclusive," which usually means it's fabricated and meant to cause trouble. But sometimes he's right, and since he has such a huge audience this is surely going to get a lot of play.

Official Washington and the entire press corps will be rocked when Hillary Rodham Clinton is picked as Kerry's VP and a massive love fest will begin!

So predicts a top Washington insider, who spoke to the DRUDGE REPORT on condition he not be named.

"All the signs point in her direction," said the insider, one of the most influential and well-placed in the nation's capital. "It is the solution to every Kerry problem."

The whole long "exclusive" is an interview with this anonymous source, who could well be Drudge's dry cleaner. All I'll say is that Kerry could make worse choices, like Gephardt. But not much worse. If things aren't polarized enough already, just imagine what bringing a Clinton onto the ticket will do. I don't even want to think about it. To the wingnuts, Hillary's nothing less than the Antichrist, even more sinister and evil than Kofi Annan.

UPDATE: In fine form, Wonkette counters that the GOP is considering bumping Dick Cheney for Santa Claus.

Official Washington has fallen in love with the idea, says a well-placed elementary school student. And while some claim to have spotted Kris Kringle leaving the Clarendon headquarters of BC04 early this morning, the campaign continues to deny that they will bump Cheney to pursue what one analyst calls a "very Northern strategy," and another simply dismissed as "polarizing."

St. Nick's connections to the birthday of Bush mentor Jesus Christ would seem to put Claus on good footing with evangelical groups, yet some close to the campaign worry that when it comes to politics, he wobbles like a bowl full of jelly. ("Like he really holds people to this naughty/nice thing. When's the last time someone actually got a lump of coal in their stocking?" snipes a consultant.) Others say his party affiliations are dubious. Kringle campaigned vigorously to eliminate the estate tax and has given generously to GOP causes; still, a White House insider says that deep down, "I always figured he was a lib -- with his giving ways, his environmentally sound transportation, his hippy beard, and bright red clothing." But, as another source said, "It still makes more sense than McCain."

Developing. . .

Now that is one funny lady, and she has the Matt Drudge style down to the letter.

A WaPo editorial mulls over Hong Kong's evolution since the handover seven years ago and concludes there's good reason for HK's citizens -- and the Bush administration -- to protest.

Beijing officials seek to balance their bad-cop tactics with a good-cop strategy of boosting the territory's economy with aid. But Hong Kong is not, as sometimes caricatured, a city of businessmen who don't care about politics. Many residents resent Beijing's hard-line tactics. That much has been shown in the democrats' big win in local district elections in November, along with rising voter registration levels in advance of September's election. Hundreds of thousands are expected to demonstrate tomorrow in favor of democratization.

That such protests are permitted shows that Hong Kong remains freer in many ways than the rest of China. But if voter intimidation and ballot rigging mar September's election, it will lead to serious questions about the extent of Hong Kong's autonomy. The Bush administration, which so far has made only mild statements encouraging Beijing to "be responsive" to the people of Hong Kong, ought to vigorously condemn the tactics of voter intimidation and make clear that U.S.-China relations will suffer if the democracy and autonomy of the territory are further eroded.

Don't hold our breath.

At first I thought it was an Onion-type parody. But it's not.

A bit off-topic, but not really: As i posted earlier, I changed to Firefox (yes, I still plan to try opera, though the idea of ads on the screen bugs me) and want to uninstall IE altogether -- but I can't. I find that when i go to certain sites, like my Asian bank where i still have a bit of $$, I cannot enter my user name and PIN with Firefox. When I switch to Explorer, it works fine.

This is extremely frustrating and it tells me that try as we might to wean ourselves off of Microsoft, it is still a Bill Gates world and we have no choice but to acquiece. This is exactly why monopolies are so scary -- they leave us with no choice.

It's especially upsetting when the one choice we are left with sucks. (Fascinating, that in the long discussion about browsers a few days ago, not a single person defended MS IE; everyone seems to hate it, and yet we are forced to use it, at least sometimes.)

UPDATE: Slate on Firefox:

You've probably been told to dump Internet Explorer for a Mozilla browser before, by the same propeller-head geek who wants you to delete Windows from your hard drive and install Linux. You've ignored him, and good for you. Microsoft wiped out Netscape in the Browser Wars of the late 1990s not only because the company's management pushed the bounds of business ethics, but also because its engineers built a better browser. When Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale approved the Mozilla project—an open-source browser based on Netscape's code—in 1998, it seemed like a futile act of desperation.

But six years later, the surviving members of the Mozilla insurgency are staging a comeback. The latest version of Firefox, released this Monday, has a more professional look, online help, and a tool that automatically imports your bookmarks, history, site passwords, and other settings from Explorer. Meanwhile, all-conquering Internet Explorer has been stuck in the mud for the past year, as Microsoft stopped delivering new versions. The company now rolls out only an occasional fix as part of its Windows updates. Gates and company won the browser war, so why keep fighting it?

The problem is that hackers continue to find and exploit security holes in Explorer. Many of them take advantage of Explorer's ActiveX system, which lets Web sites download and install software onto visitors' computers, sometimes without users' knowledge. ActiveX was meant to make it easy to add the latest interactive multimedia and other features to sites, but instead it's become a tool for sneaking spyware onto unsuspecting PCs. That's why the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a partnership between the tech industry and Homeland Security, recently took the unusual step of advising people to consider switching browsers. Whether or not you do, US-CERT advises increasing your Internet Explorer security settings, per Microsoft's instructions. (Alas, the higher setting disables parts of Slate's interface.) Even if you stop using Explorer, other programs on your computer may still automatically launch it to connect to sites.

Firefox eschews ActiveX and other well-known infection paths. You can configure it to automatically download most files when you click on them, but not .exe files, which are runnable programs. I thought this was a bug before I realized Firefox was saving me from myself, since .exe files could be viruses or stealth installers.

There is much, much more to this article. If you're still wondering about why you should make the switch, it's pretty convincing.

Or at least in Shnaghia. And not the pirated DVD version. Here's how.

John Kerry spoke to a huge crowd at Phoenix Civic Plaza today, and I was lucky enough to get one of the front-section seats, just a few rows in front of him.

I am going to keep this post short and I'm going to try to avoid effusive metaphors and gushing phrases. But I was utterly blown away and surprised, because I had no idea to what extent the John Kerry I know from soundbites and articles differs from John Kerry in person.

My attitude as I took my seat was that I was going to force myself to like Kerry. After all, I knew he was a bore, a distant and somewhat haughty elitist, a singularly uncharismatic old-timer with very limited appeal to The Man on the Street.

I can't tell you how wrong I was on each and every count. Kerry's grace, poise, charm, wit, self-effacing humor, mental agility, deep compassion and obvious intelligence were a breath -- no, an overpowering gust -- of fresh air.

He never talked at us or down to us, but rather connected, almost Clinton-like (though never quitethat warm) with everyone in the room. His speech was superb, and I am a critical son of a bitch, even with pols that I like. He knew how to get the crowd revved up, and how to bring it down a bit only to take them higher a few minutes later. He won one standing ovation after another.

Giving a speech is one thing. When our preznit has a good speech in front of his beady eyes, he, too, can be excellent. But where Kerry scored highest was the Q & As, where he had to think on his feet. His responses were swift, specific, and well thought out, unfolding with a logic and depth Bush could never command. As he answered questions, I tried to imagine him debating Bush with the eyes of the entire world upon them. It seemed utterly preposterous. Kerry, former head of the debate club at Yale, will trounce him alive.

Do you remember Bush at his famous "magic tie" press conference where someone asked what his biggest mistake since taking office was, and he disintegrated into a tongue-tied, trembling wreck? In that moment, we saw the exact kind of paralysis and helplessness he exhibited reading My Pet Goat as minute after minunte after minute after minute after minute passed after he was told "America is under attack."

I tried to imagine John Kerry becoming similarly paralyzed. It's possible, but I can't imagine it. The Bush paralysis we saw in the aforementioned instances was an amplification of the bumbling, stumbling, deer-in-the-headlights leadership we had come to expect from Bush since day one. It was nothing really new, just a lot worse than usual. Kerry is a man of gravitas, of informed thoughts and sharp analysis. I saw that today. And for the first time, I know he would be a real president; he wouldn't need to be pushed out of the elementary school classroom by his chief of staff if America were attacked. He wouldn't stand there like the village idiot if he were asked a tough question he hadn't prepared for.

Is John Kerry perfect? Is he the very best candidate we can find for president? No to both, and I still harbor my same concerns about the lack of both directness and responsibility he's shown at time with the press. (But then, this stems from those those over-publicized episodes when the media was being silly, like pressing him about his owning an SUV. What's wrong with owning an SUV? Is it a crime? I live with a guy who loves animals and nature and drives an SUV.)

But what I saw today is that John Kerry is a far stronger candidate than I had ever suspected. And it drove home to me that this is still a big secret here in America. And that makes sense: We are, for better or for worse, at war. All the world's cameras are fixated on Iraq. It dominates the headline and the news programs, and there's been very little coverage of much else. The convention and then the debates -- those will be Kerry's big opportunities, when he will be in the spotlight.

Watching him today, I felt thrilled, because I saw it really was possible. Kerry may very well be our next president, and it would be a great thing, not only because he is not Bush, but because he is John Kerry. Next to him, Bush is a small and inconsequential shrub. He's still dangerous, and it's going to be a bloody battle. But I can promise, had you been there today, you would feel just as I do now -- energized, optimistic and thoroughly impressed.

But we all knew beforehand it was strictly for show.

Iyad Akmush Kanum, 23, learnt the limits of sovereignty on Monday when US prosecutors refused to uphold an Iraqi judges' order acquitting him of attempted murder of coalition troops.

US prosecutors said that he was being returned to the controversial Abu Ghraib prison because under the Geneva Conventions they were not bound by Iraqi law....

Faisal Estrabadi, an Iraqi lawyer, said yesterday after the refusal to release Mr Kanum: "If the Iraqi courts have acquitted an individual he must be released. Anything else is a violation of sovereignty."

"Iraq cannot be one large Guantánamo Bay."

Why not, pray tell?

Via Eschaton.

Anyone surprised?

With two days remaining before what is expected to be a huge pro-democracy march on Thursday, Chinese authorities are clamping down to prevent news of the demonstration from spreading on the mainland, while leading democrats here have split over tactics.

Mainland tourists have flooded Hong Kong in the past year, taking advantage of a relaxation of Chinese exit-visa rules that was intended to help the economy here. The annual commemoration here on June 4 of the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings drew large numbers of mainlanders this year, watching silently an event that would have quickly been broken up by the police if it had occurred anywhere else in China.

But travel industry officials say China has cut back very sharply this week on the number of mainlanders allowed to be in Hong Kong during the march on Thursday, which will protest Beijing's decision not to allow general elections here.

Charles Ng, the vice chairman of the Hong Kong Inbound Tour Operators Association, said Tuesday that relatively few tour groups were scheduled to enter this Chinese territory for the rest of the week. The typical pace in recent months has been as many as 500 groups a day.

Chinese censors blocked the entry of Western newspapers immediately after the commemoration of the Tiananmen Square crackdown earlier this month, and even removed pages of later newspapers that had articles mentioning the Hong Kong protest. Britain turned Hong Kong over to China in 1997.

It almost sounds as if they're afraid of something.

I hate to tell them, but I'm sure word of the HK protest has spread thru China via the Internet already, and to a large extent the consors are only fooling themselves.

And it's funny. Check it out.

William F. Buckley Jr. sees the light.

"With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago," Mr. Buckley said. "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

Unfortunately, with the economy "drifting upward," Josh Marshall fears that Bush may well win in November despite the Iraq fiasco.

CBS/NYT has a new poll out showing a Bush rebound and a neck-and-neck race, with the president's rise due to public perceptions of an improving economy?

One sounding means little in itself, of course. But this does seem to be the general direction -- a slow upward drift based on a recovering economy contending with the majority's belief that the president's foreign policy is fundamentally flawed.

Time to mobilize the troops. Kerry is anything but a shoe-in and we can't let down our guard.

Check out Danwei's piece -- apparently it just might happen. And he says the DVD is already out in some areas. On the one hand, I can understand why some in China would delight in making the US appear dysfunctional, corrupt and creepy. On the other hand, do they want to inspire local Michael Moores-in-training to think about making their own movies criticizing the CCP? There's ample material.

Most of my readership (all 12 readers) are in Asia, and I know they come here for brilliant commentary and deep insights, especially on China. I apologize for being so engrossed (a nice way of saying "obsessed") with US politics lately. And with Michael Moore's new movie. I'll try to get back to a more balanced menu of topics, but I have to admit, right now I feel America is at war -- with itself. And I feel if we (the smart people) don't take this country back from them (the not-so-smart people), our great country will inevitably slide further backwards as the Bill of Rights is whittled away and blatant, unashamed lying forever replaces productive political discourse.

I am obsessed with censorship in China, so I have to be equally obsessed with what I see as similar patterns in America. No, not necessarily government imposed censorship -- but an eerie post-911 pressure to not speak out, to be silent on that which only a few years ago would have created a national outcry.

I'm not putting up this post to argue any specific point, just to explain why this blog has taken such a turn lately, which some may say (and have said) is off course. It may be a somewhat different course than before, but I don't think it's "off" -- just focused on a different part of the world for now. I promise, Asia isn't going anywhere. As long as part of me is still there (in other words, forever), this blog will have an Asia slant. Sometimes, like now, as our elections approach, that slant may just be a little less obvious.

Why Gephardt would be a great choice for VP! Hilarious.

Gephardt would have an amazing pull with loser voters, voters who like losing the House to opposing parties, voters who have a long history of being supported by decrepit and dying labor institutions in failing political campaigns, just people who generally like to lose. He could swing loser states, such as Wyoming or Rhode Island, or put states with a large loser population, such as Nevada or Alabama, into play.

The upside to having a Kerry-Gephardt ticket is it would take all those people who go into shock in the voting booth thinkin’ “Oh dear god we nominated Kerry?!” and push them just far enough over the edge with “Oh dear god we nominated Kerry and Gephardt?!” that it would sort of jar them into a feeling of complacent somnambulism that would render them susceptible to voting for Kerry-Gephardt anyway. The downside to this is that such a hypthetical waking sleepstate could also get them to vote for Nader.

Via Belle at Crooked Timber, who in turn says:

This is so, so very true.... Gephardt? Gephardt??!! Please, God, don’t let the Democratic party snatch certain defeat from the jaws of potential victory by choosing Dick Gephardt as the VP candidate. Pleasepleaseplease. Anybody but Gephardt. If the DP makes me cast a vote for a Kerry/Gephardt ticket I’m going to…well, crap, just put out like a straight-ticket ho. They could put a can of processed cheese food on the ballot against Bush, and I would vote for it. But I’m not going to enjoy it! And no ticket with Gephardt on it is going to win, ever in a million years! How can this blindingly obvious fact be so clear to Giblets yet obscure to Kerry? Maybe they are just toying with us. Maybe. Then when they pick Vilsack, instead of saying, “who the hell?” we will all just be so grateful they didn’t pick Gephardt that we’ll get all fired up, like, “Hey, that Vilsack, he sure does…have a lot of consonants in his name! Frickin’ awesome!”

John, are you listening? (I thought Vilsack was a type of pickle.)

Actually, it's a bit big for a bumper sticker. Wallpaper, maybe?

Via UggaBugga.

It was bad enough when Matt Drudge tried to make a ruckus over an alleged affair between John Kerry and an intern -- a total fantasy. Now he's banging the drum to get Kerry's old divorce records unsealed, hoping to create an instant replay of last week's episode with Jack Ryan in Illinois.

This is sickening because it so dramatically goes against the role of the journalist. Any idiot can see in a heartbeat what Drudge is doing. (Whenever Drudge uses exclamation points in his stories, you know he's trying hard to stir up the shit.)

After last week's front page headlines over ugly unsealed divorce records in the Republican Illinois senate race, media outlets now face a dilemma: What to do about Democrat presidential hopeful John Kerry's sealed divorce records!

The race is on in political and media circles to gauge the import of Kerry's sealed July 25, 1988 divorce from his first wife, Julia Stimson Thorne.

TRIBUNE, which successfully sued a court to gain access to Illinois Republican Jack Ryan's divorce papers and child custody records [over the objection of both Ryan and his former wife], is considering a similar push on Kerry, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

[TRIBUNE owns WLVI-TV Channel 56 in Boston. It could use its Massachusetts connection as a jumping point to petition the court which granted Kerry a divorce, sources explain.]

Other news outlets may soon follow.

CAMPAIGN CALLS DIVORCE DIGGING 'GUTTER BALL'

The Kerry campaign late Sunday called any old divorce digging a game of political "gutter ball."

"This is a trash hunt," said a senior Kerry source, who asked not to be named.

"No, I do not have a clue what is in the papers," explained the source. "But it is none of my business. And its none of your business, or any one's business... You're playing a game of gutter ball, Drudge."

"Other news outlets may follow." Oh, that is journalism at its finest! Why not, "Other news outlets may not follow"? Both are equally true. No, what Drudge is really saying, exactly as he did with the Kerry kerfuffle, is, "I sure hope I can whip up the other news outlets to run with this piece-of-shit smear campaign of mine."

Drudge is a disgrace, a blight on the profession, a gossip monger and a whore. To hell with him.

Update: Andrew Sullivan comments.

This speaks for itself.

Michael Moore's anti-Bush "Fahrenheit 9/11" became the highest-grossing documentary of all time on its first weekend in release, taking in $21.8 million as it packed theaters across the country this weekend.

The movie, mocking President Bush and criticizing his decision to go to war in Iraq, was No. 1 at the box office, beating out the popular comedies "White Chicks" and "DodgeBall," which were playing on almost triple the number of screens.

Theater owners in large cities and smaller towns reported sellout crowds over the weekend, with numerous theaters declaring house records.

The phenomenal opening represented a decisive victory for Mr. Moore and for the Miramax movie executives Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who released the film independently after it was rejected by Miramax's corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, as too political.

"We sold out in Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg," in North Carolina, Mr. Moore said on Sunday. "We sold out in Army-base towns. We set house records in some of these places. We set single-day records in a number of theaters. We got standing ovations in Greensboro, N.C.

"The biggest news to me this morning is this is a red-state movie," he said, referring to the state whose residents voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. "Republican states are embracing the movie, and it's sold out in Republican strongholds all over the country."

Harvey Weinstein said: "It's beyond anybody's expectations. I'd have to say the sky's the limit on this movie. Who knows what territory we're in."

Update: And here's what's in the Wapo:

Jim Welsh, 65, drove more than 120 miles from his home in Salisbury, Md., to see the movie. The editor of a film and literature magazine, Welsh said, "I'd like to see for myself Mr. Moore's methods and message, unlike those right-wing people who will trash it without having a clue what it involves."

Kitty Dana, 48, said she cried through two-thirds of it. "It was incredibly moving, not just satirical," said Dana, who works for the American Friends Service Committee, an antiwar group.

"It says a little about American arrogance and power," said Chandra Pant, 51, of Delhi, India, who was visiting the Danas.

Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel had no comment on the box office numbers, but suggested that those wanting another view visit www.GeorgeWBush.com and see a compilation of clips titled "Kerry Coalition of the Wild-Eyed." In general, the campaign has said it did not want to take on Moore because it would lend him credibility.

Moore made no apologies for his partisanship. "Documentaries by their very nature are supposed to have a point of view," he said during the conference call. He calls his documentary "an op-ed piece -- it presents my opinion based on fact." He said he believes the movie is playing strongly in Middle America, and that it has confounded theories that "it would only speak to the choir."

"The documentary filmgoing audience is not that large. . . . I would imagine tens of thousands of people came this weekend who had never been to a documentary in a movie theater in their lives," says Moore.

The distributors say they plan to add a couple of hundred theaters this coming weekend, and additional theaters the following weekend. By then the competition will include one of the summer's anticipated blockbusters, "Spider-Man 2."

"We look forward to joining with 'Spider-Man' to bringing truth and justice all across America," Moore said.

Good headline; good photo. Maybe Calvin Klein will offer him a job. Move over, Marky Mark.

[Photo courtesy of the anonymous Philly blogger.]

Billmon on why the right is so frightened of Michael Moore, and so willing to adopt a double standard when discussing him.

For years now, Limbaugh, Coulter and their inferior imitations have been passing off their slanted misreadings, unproven allegations and flimsy lies as factual reporting. When caught out on a lie or a smear, they either ignore the evidence, or - like Limbaugh - retreat into the phony defense of arguing that all they're doing is expressing a subjective opinion. "I'm just in the entertainment business," Rush likes to say.

Well, now there's someone on the left who knows how to play their game, and play it brilliantly. Moore may be an egomaniac, and a huckster showman in the best (or worst) tradition of P.T. Barnum and Walter Winchell, but man, he's effective. He's learned to play the mainstream media like a Stradivarius.

No wonder the right wingers are scared of Moore - he's even better then they are at using the media as an unwilling amplifier. Which is why all the conservative caterwauling and all disapproving tut tuts from the "responsible" press have only helped ensure Fahrenheit 9/11 a wider distribution.

In other words, Moore's managed to break the code. He's figured out how to sell an angry radical (or at least semi-radical) message to a mass audience.

That's a major accomplishment. And if the end result isn't exactly my idea of a civilized political discourse (I'll reserve judgement for now) it clearly is a powerful and successful example of fighting fire with fire.

And right now, a little fire may be what the American left needs most.

The right has been giving us much, much, much worse than Moore for a decade. Now when given a mild taste of their own recipe, they go bonkers. They curse. They hiss. They shout treason and "liar!" At least Moore backs up what he says with evidence, usually self-incriminating video clips of those he's criticizing.

Very funny. Dowd looks at how Cheney is roaming the nation, wreaking havoc on Bush and his image. (His intimate invitation to Patrick Leahy to "Fuck yourself" hasn't helped.) He comes across as a deranged and dangerous man.

After reading this rundown of the past few days' headaches for our dear leader, all I can say is "Heh."

Poor guy. My heart goes out to him.

A detailed Newsweek article takes a look at how recent politcal pressures have forced Hong Kong to mature from a commercial center relatively uninterested in politics into an epicenter of political consciousness, as the Mainland faces off against politcal activists in the SAR. A true baptism by fire.

For decades the conventional wisdom was that Hong Kong was almost solely a commercial city—the politics could be left to Taiwan, thanks. Some analysts even tried to explain away last year's massive rally as more a reaction to Hong Kong's moribund economy, and the public-health panic over SARS, than the dawning of a new political era. Not true. Today, in defiance of a Beijing —ruling in April, many Hong Kong citizens are asking for something they've never had before—universal elections. And led by a savvy new generation of activists, they're digging in for a long, hard struggle with the mainland's conservative elite and their proxies in Hong Kong. "People have to keep coming back, year after year, until we get [direct elections]," says lawyer Audrey Eu, one of the democratic movement's new leaders and a first-time Legco member. "Hong Kong will never have universal suffrage until you stand up for it...."

The democrats are not the only ones demonstrating a new political purpose. Even the stodgy pro-Beijing DAB party, which claims 2,000 members, is seeking a new image. After a dismal showing in the November 2003 elections for district council seats, it's been promoting younger, better-educated personalities such as chairman Ma Lik, who's praised the new surge in political activism. Last year's July 1 turnout was a call for better governance and accountability, Ma says. "Hong Kong's political paradigm is shifting, and it's doing so for the better."

The article implies that things have cooled substantially since last year's half-million man march on July 1, and that Hong Kong may well be resigned to no free elections for several more years. As always, money is the No. 1 consideration for the practical-minded Hong Kongers, and the Chinese tourists are spending lots of cash in HK. So maybe rocking the boat too much will be counterproductive, at least in their eyes.

Nevertheless, with the July 1 anniversary next week there will be another massive protest, and from all I can tell there's still plenty of dissatisfaction with the Mainland's plans for Hong Kong's political future. Has rebellion been replaced with resignation? I guess we'll have a good idea next week.

A commenter told me a few days ago that I shouldn't paste entire articles here, and I rarely do. But this is going to be my second exception in a week, as this review of Fahrenheit 9/11 is very special and I want every visitor here to see it. I want them to realize just how powerful Moore's depiction of our government in action, of our tax dollars at work, actually are. I want them to get that it is almost impossible to walk out of the the theater the same person you were when you walked in.

Those with small minds who refuse to see the movie and who take comfort in their pre-conceived notions and hearsay-based prejudices may be unreachable. But because of the type of person I am, I won't stop trying. I apologize in advance if it is redundant, tiresome, and annoying. But people have to wake up to what is going on here. They have to know what forces were at work to get us into this war. They have to know why their children are dying. They have to know who their president is. And Moore doesn't need to tell them -- his clips of Bush do all the talking. In other words, Bush himself tells you just who he is, in a way you've never seen him before.

Here is the review I just read, that I found more powerful than any other because it does not review the movie -- it reviews how people reacted to the movie. What it did to them, and to their belief systems. And that is a powerful story indeed.

Before the movie started, Leslie Hanser prayed.

"I prayed the Lord would open my eyes," she said.

For months, her son, Joshua, a college student, had been drawing her into political debate. He'd tell her she shouldn't trust President Bush. He'd tell her the Iraq war was wrong. Hanser, a 41-year-old homemaker, pushed back. She defended the president, supported him fiercely.

But Joshua kept at her, until she prayed for help understanding her son's fervor.

Emerging from Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, her eyes wet, Hanser said she at last understood. "My emotions are just... " She trailed off, waving her hands to show confusion. "I feel like we haven't seen the whole truth before."

That's the reaction Moore hopes to provoke with his film, which explores the ties between the Bush family and Osama bin Laden's relatives, the president's response to the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq. Moore has said he aims to shake the apathetic, move the undecided -- and inspire voters to deny Bush a second term.

Even teens 'glued to screen'

Riding a week of enormous publicity, and controversy, Fahrenheit 9/11 was a hit at the box office, taking in $8.2 million to $8.4 million in its first day, positioning it as the weekend's No. 1 film. Opening Friday on 868 screens, the movie grossed more than the farces White Chicks and DodgeBall, even though those films showed on far more screens.

Industry sources estimated that the weekend gross for Fahrenheit 9/11 could top the $21 million that Moore's Bowling for Columbine -- until now, the highest-grossing documentary ever -- took in during its entire run.

Fahrenheit 9/11 got a shot of free publicity when Walt Disney Co., concerned about the movie's partisan edge, barred a subsidiary from releasing it. The buzz only grew last month when the film won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Yet its appeal seemed to take some by surprise: In the heavily Hispanic and Asian community of Downey, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles, theater manager William Vasquez was a bit astonished at the line, which was so long that he decided to show the film on two screens simultaneously Friday night.

"I don't know of any documentary that has created this kind of stir," he said, noting that even teenagers seemed "glued to the screen."

In many cities, and even in conservative suburbs, the crowds were predictably (and loudly) liberal, hissing and hooting their reactions to Bush on-screen.

In suburban St. Louis, in a multiplex catering to well-off neighborhoods that were flocked with Bush/Cheney signs in 2000, the rowdy throng cheered when a man in back stood to shout an appeal for Democratic Party volunteers. "Anyone here for Nader?" another man called out. He was soundly booed.

In another conservative neighborhood, the audience at an Orange County, Calif., multiplex chanted: "Throw Bush out, throw Bush out" as the lights came on.

College student Jebodiah Beard, 25, characterized the crowd this way: "I think we're preaching to the choir."

Moore has acknowledged as much but sees no need to apologize.

"It's good to give the choir something to sing," he said at a politician-packed premiere in Washington last week. "The choir has been demoralized."

If so, the movie was an electric wake-up call.

Outside a sold-out screening Friday in Santa Monica, Calif., activists stamped hands with peace signs and passed around petitions calling for universal health care, gay rights and the repeal of the Patriot Act.

"I can't imagine anyone coming out of (the movie) and not working their brains out to get rid of this administration," said Mimi Adams, 70, who was holding a sign that said: "No One Died When Clinton Lied."

In theaters nationwide, many viewers said they couldn't imagine loyal Republicans coming to see a movie the Bush administration has dismissed as a twisted montage of misleading innuendo and outright falsehoods. But for all the partisan hooting, the movie did appear to draw at least a strong smattering of the Republican and the undecided voters that Moore most desperately hopes to reach.

And some of them said they were deeply moved.

Moved enough, perhaps, to consider voting for Kerry in November.

For Richard Hagen, 56, it was the footage from Iraq: The raw cries of bombed civilians, the clenched-teeth agony of wounded American troops. A retired insurance agent from the wealthy River Oaks neighborhood in central Houston, Hagen described himself as a lifelong Republican. But then, standing by his silver Mercedes, he amended that: A former lifelong Republican.

"Seeing (the war) brings it home in a way you don't get from reading about it," he said. "I won't be voting for a Republican presidential candidate this time."

Mary Butler, too, may not bring herself to punch the ballot for Bush.

She didn't vote for him in 2000, but Butler, 48, said that until this weekend, she was leaning strongly toward supporting him this year. "In a war situation, I figured it was too hard to switch horses midstream. I thought the country would be too vulnerable," she said.

Butler, a librarian from suburban St. Louis, said one sentence in Moore's film made her rethink.

After showing faces of the men and women of America's military, Moore reminds his audience that they have volunteered to sacrifice their futures for our country. We owe them just one obligation, he says: To send them into harm's way only when we absolutely must.

That got Butler. She doesn't feel the war in Iraq fits into that category. And that one sentence -- a filmmaker's accusing voice-over -- might cost Bush her vote in the pivotal swing state of Missouri: "This is probably the strongest I've ever felt about voting against him," she said.

'An impact of some sort'

Many viewers seemed especially moved by the story of Lila Lipscomb, the mother at the heart of Fahrenheit 9/11. When Moore first encounters her in Flint, Mich., she speaks with pride of her children's military service, of all the opportunities the armed forces can give them. Then her son is killed in Iraq.

Appearing with Moore at the film's premiere in Washington, Lipscomb received a standing ovation.

"President Bush said he was a president of war," Lipscomb said. "Well, I stand before you tonight as a mother that is now a mother of war. I urge all of America to stop being ignorant. Open your eyes to see. Open your ears to hear. Open your mouth to speak."

Many who watched Fahrenheit 9/11 over the weekend vowed the movie would spur them to do just that -- to look deeper, listen closer, to speak out with conviction.

In the end, however, some doubted whether a summer movie, however pointed, could really affect the outcome of November's election.

"It will have an impact of some sort," said Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who is interviewed by Moore in the film, "but I'm not sure what."

Of course, the long-term effect has yet to be seen. It should be out on DVD before the election, so those who may have forgotten can enjoy a healthy reminder.

As for myself: After seeing it yesterday, I drove to the Kerry volunteer office and got my Kerry bumper stickers and tickets to see him here in town next week. And I gave money -- a sizable sum for me while I'm trying to get on my feet. Looking at the effect the film had on people in the above article, I expect that by the time the weekend's over, millions of others will have done the same or more than I did.

Despite China's much praised "leniency" toward cyberdissident Du Daobin, China's net surfers and bloggers (and especially Shanghai's) need to know they are being closely watched by the CCP, which is ruthlessly revving up its control of the Internet, according to the NY Times. Emphasis added:

Both in China and abroad, some commentators quickly applauded what seemed like an official show of leniency toward the accused man, Du Daobin, a prolific author of online essays on issues of democracy and free speech.

But many among China's rapidly growing group of Internet commentators are warning that what appears to be government magnanimity in this high-profile case conceals a quiet but concerted push to tighten controls of the Internet and surveillance of its users even though China's restrictions on the medium are already among the broadest and most invasive anywhere....

As its first line of defense against what in another era China's Communist leadership might have called ideological pollution, Beijing controls the Internet by insisting that all Web traffic pass through government-controlled servers. Now, coming on top of these measures, which are all deployed at the national level, China's provincial governments are getting into the act, introducing regulations of their own that critics say severely impinge on privacy and freedom of speech.

In recent weeks, Shanghai, China's largest and most Internet-connected city, has quietly introduced a series of controls, arguably the country's most far-reaching yet, and critics fear, a model eventually to be used nationwide. Described by city officials as a measure intended to combat pornography and to bar entry for minors to Internet bars, the Shanghai regulations require customers to use swipe cards that would allow administrators or others to record their national identity numbers and track their Internet use.

The regulations have kicked up little public debate, in part because they have received little publicity here during the planning stage. But fierce protests have appeared online, where many active Internet users are interpreting the new regulations as an extension of the police state....

Some experts on China's Internet censorship say that in releasing Mr. Du recently, the government may have been making a subtle bow to China's own domestic public opinion, as expressed through online communication and debate.

International analysts who follow China's Internet scene say that the government has been particularly taken aback by the explosion in a new form of online communication for China - the Weblog, or blog. It started last year with a celebrated case of a young woman who made a running online commentary about her own sex life, and now hundreds of thousands of people take enthusiastically to this form.

Ah yes, Muzi Mei (or is it Mu Zi Mei?). No matter how the blog phenomenon caught on in China, it certainly appears to have the CCP in a tizzy.

According to the analysts, the country's censors, always eager to contain waves of public opinion before they get out of hand, particularly in matters of politics, have become alarmed that despite their intense efforts, Internet technology is quickly making free expression far harder to control.

"With the Du case, the government is saying, 'Look, our actions may be nicer than in the past, but fundamentally, the judgment of the crime is unchanged, so don't be fooled, we are also willing to be harsh,' '' said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley. "No matter how hard they try, though, it is a fact that the volume of online information is increasing vastly, and there's nothing the government can do about that. You can monitor hundreds of bulletin boards, but controlling hundreds of thousands of bloggers is very different.''

I wonder if the new controls have anything to do with recent remarks I've seen in some Chinese blogs about problems connecting to certain sites, and long page-load times. If I remember, some of these were from Shanghai blogs (but I'm not certain). I also have to wonder, what is to stop China from banning blogs altogether. First blogger, then typepad and some native blogging services. If blogs pose such a threat to social stability and harmony (gimme a break), why not impose a blanket ban?

In any case, it's not good news. It also seems wasteful, because most of us believe, sensibly, that the government simply can't win the battle to wrap its tentacles around the hydra that is the Internet. So the fact that they're so intent on investing huge numbers of renminbi and man-hours to do so is irrational -- but it is also completely in keeping with the government's mindset. Sadly, it is proof positive that the change for which so many thirst is arriving more slowly and less impressively than anticipated. This is a step in the wrong direction, perhaps even a Great Leap Backwards.

I switched to Firefox after reading this post, and this article.

I am definitely glad I did. Firefox is quick (it took seconds to install), easy to use and, most important, it isn't Microsoft. It's great.

Update: Amazing. For two weeks my Yahoo email has been loaded with bugs, ever since they upgraded the service and increased the storage. I was totally unable to send attachments; when I clicked "attach files" it said "Your browser does not allow attachments." I was totally screwed. After I switched to Firefox today, not a single problem -- I can attach as many files as I want. I was having other serious problems -- pages on Living in China and many other sites failed to fit on my screen; I simply couldn't read any article posted to that site and others. Now they are all perfect.

Fuck Microsoft! How come no one told me about this before??

[The copy below was sent to me by fellow blogger Kevin Kim. Censorship is just about my No. 1 hot button, so I hope you can all take a moment to read his letter. It is complete and unedited.]

Fellow blogger,

I am sending this message to the bloggers on my blogroll (and a few
other folks) in the hopes that some of you will print this, or at
least find it interesting enough for comment. I'm not usually the
type to distribute such messages, but I felt this was important enough
to risk disturbing you.

As some of you may already know, a wing of the South Korean
government, the Ministry of Information and Culture (MIC), is
currently clamping down on a variety of blogging service providers and
other websites. The government is attempting to control access to
video of the recent Kim Sun-il beheading, ostensibly because the video
will have a destabilizing influence. (I haven't seen the video.)

Many Western expat bloggers in Korea are in an uproar; others, myself
included, are largely unsurprised: South Korea has not come far out
of the shadow of its military dictatorship past. My own response to
this censorship is not so much anger as amusement, because the
situation represents an intellectual challenge as well as a chance to
fight for freedom of expression. Perhaps even to fight for freedom,
period.

South Korea is a rapidly evolving country, but in many ways it remains
the Hermit Kingdom. Like a turtle retreating into its shell, the
people are on occasion unable to deal with the harsh realities of the
world around them. This country is, for example, in massive denial
about the atrocities perpetrated in North Korea, and, as with many
Americans, is in denial about the realities of Islamic terrorism,
whose roots extend chronologically backward far beyond the lifetime of
the Bush Administration. This cultural tendency toward denial (and
overreaction) at least partially explains the Korean government's move
to censor so many sites.

The fact that the current administration, led by President Noh
Mu-hyon, is supposedly "liberal"-leaning makes this censorship more
ironic. It also fuels propagandistic conservative arguments that
liberals are, at heart, closet totalitarians. I find this to be a
specious caricature of the liberal position (I consider myself neither
liberal nor conservative), but to the extent that Koreans are
concerned about what image they project to the world, it is legitimate
for them to worry over whether they are currently playing into
stereotype: South Korea is going to be associated with other
violators of human rights, such as China.

Of the many hypocrisies associated with the decision to censor, the
central one is that no strong governmental measures were taken to
suppress the distribution of the previous beheading videos (Nick Berg
et al.). This, too, fuels the suspicion that Koreans are selfish or,
to use their own proverbial image, "a frog in a well"-- radically
blinkered in perspective, collectively unable to empathize with the
sufferings of non-Koreans, but overly sensitive to their own
suffering.

I am writing this letter not primarily to criticize all Koreans (I'm
ethnically half-Korean, and an American citizen), nor to express a
generalized condemnation of Korean culture. As is true anywhere else,
this culture has its merits and demerits, and overall, I'm enjoying my
time here. No, my purpose is more specific: to cause the South
Korean government as much embarrassment as possible, and perhaps to
motivate Korean citizens to engage in some much-needed introspection.

To this end, I need the blogosphere's help, and this letter needs wide
distribution (you may receive other letters from different bloggers,
so be prepared!). I hope you'll see fit to publish this letter on
your site, and/or to distribute it to concerned parties: censorship
in a supposedly democratic society simply cannot stand. The best and
quickest way to persuade the South Korean government to back down from
its current position is to make it lose face in the eyes of the world.
This can only happen through a determined (and civilized!) campaign
to expose the government's hypocrisy and to cause Korean citizens to
rethink their own narrow-mindedness.

We can debate all we want about "root causes" with regard to Islamic
terrorism, Muslim rage, and all the rest, but for me, it's much more
constructive to proceed empirically and with an eye to the future.
Like it or not, what we see today is that Korea is inextricably linked
with Iraq issues, and with issues of Islamic fundamentalism. Koreans,
however, may need some persuading that this is in fact the case-- that
we all need to stand together as allies against a common enemy.

If you are interested in giving the South Korean Ministry of
Information and Culture a piece of your mind (or if you're a reporter
who would like to contact them for further information), please email
the MIC at:

webmaster@mic.go.kr

Thank you,

Kevin Kim
bighominid@gmail.com
http://bighominid.blogspot.com
(Blogspot is currently blocked in Korea, along with other providers;
please go to Unipeak.com and type my URL into the search window to
view my blog.)

PS: To send me an email, please type "hairy chasms" in the subject
line to avoid being trashed by my custom-made spam filter.

PPS: Much better blogs than mine have been covering this issue,
offering news updates and heartfelt commentary. To start you off,
visit:

http://marmot.blogs.com/korea/
http://jeffinkorea.blogs.com/
http://aboutjoel.com/
http://oranckay.net/blog/
http://kimcheegi.blogs.com/
http://gopkorea.blogs.com/flyingyangban
http://rathbonepress.tblog.com/
http://blog.woojay.net/

Here as well, Unipeak is the way to go if you're in Korea and unable
to view the above blogs. People in the States should, in theory, have
no problems accessing these sites, which all continue to be updated.

PPPS: This email is being cc'ed to the South Korean Ministry of
Information and Culture. Please note that other bloggers are writing
about the Korean government's creation of a task force that will
presumably fight internet terror. I and others have an idea that this
task force will serve a different purpose. If this is what South
Korea's new "aligning with the PRC" is all about, then there's reason
to worry for the future.

This is an important point I forgot to include in my rushed review last night of Fahrenheit 9/11. In the opening scenes, when a series of black Congresspeople from poor districts of Florida plead with Al Gore and the Congreee to take into account the huge numbers of blacks who were denied the right to vote in 2000, all of the onus falls on the nation's Democtatic senators -- not a single one supported the Congressmen as the nation hurried to "move on" and inaugurate a new president.

This sort of thing threads through the movie -- it is not just the dirty tricks, shady relationships and outright lies of George W. Bush and his cronies, but the total willingness of the Democrats to let them get away with it. After 9/11, it became "treasonous" even to think that Bush may be heading in the wrong direction, and the Democrats were a key source of this sheepishness.

It is in the case of Iraq, however, that Moore is most unforgiving, depicting the Democrats as thoughtless (as in devoid of thoughts), frightened, semi-paralyzed followers. Heavy-handed and one-sided, but his video clips sure help supplement his contentions.

My favorite pundit in America is Eleanor Clift, and I want to include a snip of her own review of the film. She spoke to Moore before the premiere in DC.

Moore may be preaching to the choir, but he says, “The choir was asleep—demoralized, despairing … Cynicism and despair are the great friends of the rich and powerful. The more Americans they can get to check out of the system, [saying] they’re not going to vote [because politicians are] all crooks—that’s music to the ears of those in charge. This film is a different tune.” Moore is a propagandist in the best sense of the word. He wants to defeat President Bush, and he has marshaled facts and footage to make the case. It is unnerving to watch Bush sit stony-faced for almost a full seven minutes reading “My Pet Goat” after an aide whispers in his ear that a second plane has struck the World Trade Center and that America is under attack. Bush told the 9/11 commission he wanted to project calm; he projects paralysis.

“Fahrenheit 9/11” opens at almost 900 theaters this weekend, which is nine times more screens than Moore had for his last documentary, “Bowling for Columbine.” Attempts by GOP stalwarts to intimidate theater owners into refusing the film have only generated more demand at the box office. “Fahrenheit 9/11” broke all opening-day records in New York, out distancing “Mission Impossible” and “Men in Black.” Noting that President Clinton’s memoir, “My Life,” is also setting record sales, a pleased Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party chairman, said, “It must be driving them nuts,” them meaning the Republicans.

The strenuous efforts of right-wing activists to curtail the showing of the movie suggest they understand the potential impact of this film. Because “Fahrenheit 9/11” is a cultural phenomenon, it just might attract the young and the politically unaffiliated, voters with the power to defeat Bush.

Wonderfully ironic, how the Republicans' efforts to stifle the movie have now made it a must-see for young people.

Everyone's totally saturated with stories about Fahrenheit 9/11 by this point, so I'll be concise.

I got to see it today, as promised, at its first performance here in Arizona. While the movie is unquestionably a tour de force, I also found it had its moments of silliness, tediousness and -- is this a word? -- farfetchedness.

Michael Moore is a master film maker, and the movie flows with its own unstoppable logic, building up the tension and taking you down and tightening the strings again. It's bumpy at times, but the net effect is an overwhelming, emotional rollercoaster.

It starts with the 2000 election and effectively demonstrates -- to my own satisfaction, at least -- that this was a stolen election. He does this not by bloviating, but by showing us video clips of what happened. (Selective clips of course; everything in the movie is selective and subjective, as you'd expect.) There is no point in my describing these clips to you or arguing about them. It simply has to be seen. I don't believe anyone can walk out of that theater without having at least some serious questions about the legitimacy of Bush's victory.

We all know the points Moore makes -- the Bush family's cozy relationship with the Saudi royal family, its involvement with the Carlyle Group and the unbelievable profits the company reaps from war, the sudden and inexplicable shift from Afghanistan to Iraq, the obscene war profiteering of Bush's cronies, the indiscriminate carnage of the Iraq bombings, the brutalization of prisoners and the growing belief on the part of many soldiers that they were losing limbs for a cause they didn't understand, that they were being "sent to kill other poor people who aren't a threat to us," in the words of one soldier who swore he would never return to Iraq.

A technique Moore uses cleverly is the juxtaposition of images for maximum irony and theatrical effect. An officer says how it's all about "winning hearts and minds," and the camera cuts to soldiers terrorizing an Iraqi family for no discernible reason. The glee of the contractors is contrasted with the misery of the men in the desert. We're shown the blanket prohibition of flying in the days after 9/11, contrasted with the sudden and secretive rush to get Bin Ladin's relatives flown back home. Moore hits you over the head -- something is just plain wrong, the movie screams at us.

Again, whether or not you can poke holes in Moore's story isn't the issue. As a movie, as entertainment, and as propaganda it certainly works. At the end the entire audience stood up and cheered and whistled. I've never seen Arizonans do that before.

I did have my issues. A section on how the Army recruits poor young men was over-long and tiresome, as was the dwelling on Osama Bin Laden's family. I also thought that showing pre-war Iraq as a happy little playground was dumb and misleading, and I can't believe Moore didn't know this. But he wanted to create a dramatic juxtaposition -- the smiling happy children contrasted with gigantic bomb blasts ripping the city apart.

Most poignant, by far, was an interview with the mother of a soldier in Iraq, Lila Lipscomb, glowing with pride and love of country. Then she is interviewed later, after her son, Michael Pedersen, is killed. She reads Michael's last agonized letter, crying that Bush was a criminal who had sent them on a mission of murder. The mother's rage and grief are so palpable, it's hard to imagine not being moved. (I could hear people crying.)

Then there's the usual Moore mischief, having the Bush team, along with Blair, portrayed as the cowboy family in Bonanza; Moore riding around in a Mr. Softee truck reading the Patriot Act; ambushing congressmen to ask if they'd like to enlist their children as soldiers to fight in Iraq. It's silly, but it drives home his points. This is Moore's specialty, and he is very, very funny.

As I said a day or two before, Moore must always be taken with "a gigantic grain of sea salt." But all this talk of his being a liar and a demagogue-- it's just not the case. Most of his points are right there in the video clips -- it's hard to argue with them. You cannot brush them aside. It's a take-no-prisoners approach, aggressive and relentless and savage. But it's also backed up by a plethora of corroborating evidence.

Moore is a provocateur. And he opened my eyes with plenty of provocative footage I'd never seen before. For this alone, we should all see it. (Watch Bush reading My Pet Goat for seven minutes after being told America was under attack, and draw your own conclusions.)

It's easy to see why the movie is so controversial. And at a time when the nation is so polartized, when swing voters are in such short supply, it could have a tangible impact on the election. (I certainly hope so.) There were plenty of young people there today, and Moore just might get more of them to vote this year.

See the movie. Then we can argue.

How did I miss Ted Barlow's brilliant InstaPuppy parody of 10 days ago? This is great -- and check the comments. There's one by a certain Jon H. that approaches genius.

Take a look at this beautiful article on how a small village in northern Yunnan province is slowly being touched by the modern age. Stacks of firewood next to a satellite dish, a TV set not far from the braying donkey, electricity for the very first time (if only for 8 hours a day)....

It's a remarkable story of how things are getting better in China not only for the city dwellers but also, at least to some extent, for the poor peasants in remote and distant villages, where household incomes average as low as $300 a year.

Hot off the press, sublimely mangled sentences from a leading Chinese English-language newspaper:

Though there witnessed not a long history of MBA education in China, yet the glory that enveloped MBA has gone discolored within few years. With only a MBA laurel, one cannot obtain a high post or get in high salary any longer. When the training and enrolling advertisements of MBA posted like scabies on the street wire poles and in alleyways of China, criticism and query on the MBA education came along tempestuously.

Tempestuously? Has anyone used that word in the past 100 years? "Posted like scabies?" I don't even want to go there.

With big red apples stuffed in their mouths. World O'Crap does it again, with this belly-laugh-inducing roast of the two most vile pundits out there. The Hannity quotes had me literally laughing out loud.

Pass the gravy.

Go see the very latest poll numbers over at TPM. Six points ahead in Ohio! The numbers are certainly going to go up and down over the next four months, but there is no denying that the Republicans are stuck in the hole they dug themselves. (It's called Iraq.)

This is a smart blog, better written and better thought-out than most. I had fun browsing through it today, and I even learned a few things. Check it out.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a hit. From Fox News to the LA Times, the critics are nearly unanimous in their praise of Moore's unashamed and undisguised piece of propagandistic entertainment.

After blistering the box office in its inaugural New York launch, Michael Moore’s anti-Bush documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” opens nationally on Friday with most reviewers giving it high marks as brilliantly provocative but unflinchingly partisan.

While saying Moore’s latest work can fairly be classified as propaganda critics generally praised the film as an artfully rendered critique of President Bush, his war on terror and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

“Unabashedly partisan, wearing its determination to bring about political change on its sleeve, ‘Fahrenheit’ can be nit-picked and second-guessed, but it can’t be ignored,” wrote Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times

“It is propaganda, no doubt about it, but propaganda is most effective when it has elements of truth, and too much here is taken from the record not to have a devastating effect on viewers,” Turan added. “Anyone who is the least bit open to Moore’s theses will come away impressed.”

In a similar vein, New York Times critic A.O. Scott calls Moore “a credit to the republic” and writes of the movie: “It is worth seeing, debating and thinking about, regardless of your political allegiances.”

One of the more surprisingly glowing reviews came from Fox News.com columnist Roger Friedman, who called the film “a tribute to patriotism” and “a really brilliant piece of work...that members of all political parties should see without fail.”

While the movie review Web site Rottentomatoes.com ranked critics’ opinions as running about 80 percent in Moore’s favor, the film was not warmly received by everyone.

Commenting on “Fahrenheit 9/11” after its premiere in May at the Cannes film festival, where it won top honors, the Wall Street Journal dismissed the film as “bad” propaganda.

And under the headline: “Moore Is Less,” the New York Post’s Lou Lumenick calls the film “a heavy-handed polemic” that “isn’t half as incendiary or persuasive as its maker would have you believe.” He adds: “Moore is still basically preaching to the converted and is unlikely to win over all that many hearts and minds.”

But even some of Moore’s harshest critics acknowledge he scores points with footage of a seemingly dazed Bush remaining seated in a classroom of Florida schoolchildren for almost seven minutes after being informed that a second plane has crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

And more than a few reviews have noted that the film’s release shrewdly coincides with a presidential race focusing on the very issues explored in the documentary.

No one ever said Moore wasn't shrewd. Also self-serving, sneaky, childish, at times hypocritical and obnoxious. Hmmm, sounds like just about every other artist. I'll try to write my own review tomorrow.

Needless to say, it was all about Halliburton. The story's everywhere by now, but I read it first at Wonkette:

CNN is reporting that on the floor of the Senate yesterday, Dick Cheney told Sen. Pat Leahy, "Go fuck yourself."

We agree! Go fuck yourself -- while it's still legal!

UPDATE: Speaking of sodomy. . . Wonkette operatives tell us that the fighting words sprang from an exchange in which Cheney told Leahy he didn't like what Leahy had been saying about Halliburton, to which Leahy replied that he didn't like Cheney calling him a bad Catholic. So you'd see how "Go fuck yourself" is the only appropriate response.

Nobody says it quite like Wonkette.

But seriously, this doesn't look good. Is this acceptable behavior, on the floor of the Senate, no less? Is our VP, the guy who's a heartbeat away from the presidency, in control of himself?

UPDATE: From Sirotablog.

Cheney On Civility and Respect in Washington CLAIM:

"Governor Bush and I are also absolutely determined that [we] will restore a tone of civility and decency to the debate in Washington."
- Dick Cheney, 8/4/00

CLAIM:

"I look forward to working with you, Governor, to change the tone in Washington, to restore a spirit of civility and respect and cooperation."
- Dick Cheney, 7/25/00

FACT:

"Typically a break from partisan warfare, this year's Senate class photo turned smiles into snarls as Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly used a profanity toward one senior Democrat, sources said." Cheney "blurted out the 'F word' at Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont during a heated exchange on the Senate floor… The incident occurred on Tuesday in a terse discussion between the two that touched on politics, religion and money, with Cheney finally telling Leahy to 'f--- off' or 'go f--- yourself,' the aides said…Cheney, who is president of the Senate, ripped into Leahy for the Democratic senator's criticism this week of alleged war profiteering in Iraq by Halliburton, the oil services company that Cheney once ran...During their exchange, Leahy noted that Republicans had accused Democrats of being anti-Catholic because they are opposed to some of President Bush's anti-abortion judges, the aides said. That's when Cheney unloaded with the 'F-bomb,' aides said."
- CNN, 6/24/04; Reuters, 6/24/04

* Also...remember, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card attacked Senator Kerry for using the F-word, saying, "I'm very disappointed that [Kerry] would use that kind of language. I'm hoping that he's apologizing."

For many more utterly priceless examples of GOP double standards on the F word, go to Patriotboy now!

Links in this update are via Eschaton.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The WaPo has the story and they actually use the F word, uncensored! What will this do to our children?

In Josh Marshall's absence this week, a slew of other DC insiders are blogging over at TPM, and two of them each wrote a lengthy piece on why Kerry should pick Edwards as his running mate. Each hints that the word in DC is that he is still leaning toward Gephardt or Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, and each states unequivocally that these selections wold be wrong. They're great posts.

With so many blogs and news programs and pundits buzzing on this subject, there's precious little I can add -- except to reiterate how sorry I'd be to see Kerry steer away from Edwards solely because he is "uncomfortable" with him. Being uncomfortable with a vice president sometimes seems like a requirement, as with Kennedy-Johnson and, even more notoriously, Reagan-Bush. The decisions weren't based on comfort levels, but on realpolitik, i.e., what would be strategically smartest.

I don't think choosing Gephardt would ruin the race for Kerry, and it may help in a few Midwest hot spots. But this pales in comparison to the infusion of energy and charisma that Edwards would bring the ticket. There was a reason Edwards rose out of nowhere to do so well in the primaries, and it's his blend of optimism, populism, intelligence and youth. Gephardt's got the populism part, but none of the others.

I would be disappointed at the selection of Gephardt on more than one level, my personal lack of enthusiasm for the man aside. It would confirm a concern I have about Kerry being a bit out of touch with what the people are looking for in their leaders. It would confirm a concern among some that he lacks imagination and bravura, going for what he sees as a "safe" and "comfortable" pick. (The fact that he went after McCain proves this point is invalid, but again, it's about perceptions, and picking Gephardt creates a definite perception, one that I see as a strong negative.)

Sorry for going on about this, but at the very moment this campaign needs a breath of fresh air, a stunning rebound, I fear it may shoot itself in the foot.

John, if you are reading this now, I ask you to consider carefully. It's not about comfort, it's about winning. Make Gephardt your secretary of state or of labor or whatever -- after you win. But for now, keep your eye on the prize and do whatever it takes to capture the public's imagination and its votes. See your VP candidates through the voters' eyes, and ask yourself honestly and objectively, which one is going to energize and inspire Americans, Gephardt or Edwards? I don't think there's any debate.

This is the strangest story I've seen in a long time. I always wondered what judges did behind that high bench.

Truly shocking -- Muslim children re-enact the beheading of Nick Berg in this amazing video clip. They're having so much fun. Terrorists on training wheels.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

What are you waiting for? Very funny, and very rich in content, links and graphics.

Via UggaBugga.

The Bishop of Xuanhua was arrested on May 27 and was never heard from again. This is the third Roman Catholic bishop arrested in China over the past month, but the other two have since been released.

A strongly-worded statement demanded an explanation from China, which has long sought to control religious expression.

Its millions of Catholics are split between followers of Pope John Paul II and members of a state-backed church....

BBC religious affairs correspondent Jane Little says the Vatican response indicates it has lost patience with China.

It called the bishops' arrest "inconceivable in a country based on laws".

"The Holy See feels deep pain for these actions, for which no explanation has been given," said Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls.

They breached "the rights of the person, in particular religious freedom, that are sanctioned in numerous international documents, also underwritten by the People's Republic of China".

Thanks to a post at China Letter, I see that China Daily has printed an opinion article that actually takes the CCP to task for banning minors from using Internet cafes over the summer.

The decision to bar youth from Internet cafes deprives the right of young people with no access to personal computers to make use of legitimate business operations.

A better way to protect China's youth and at the same time respect their right to Internet access is to strengthen control on the cyber content provided by public Internet outlets. It is technically feasible to use software to block pornographic or excessively violent content.

Strengthened regulation always incurs costs. It means the government will have to spend more resources than simply issuing an all-round ban.

But it may be a better solution.

It's kind ot tame, and it doesn't touch the far bigger and more controversial issue of the government's paranoid obsession with controlling what citizens do on the Net. But the writer is absolutely correct -- the summer ban sounds like a really bad idea. And I doubt if the young people are going to be very appreciative of the CCP's concern for their well being.

Reed is no flaming liberal. Here's his thoughts on Fahrenheit 9/11.

Michael Moore leaves no turn unstoned. There are multitudes of shattering, seminal moments in his brilliant Bush-whacking documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, that reveal more about the cynicism, greed and ineptitude in the U.S. government than you will ever learn from any sound bite on the right-wing late-night cable-channel blabfests, but one will stay with me forever. Forget about the "official" reports from the White House about the activities of George W. Bush on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, insisting he learned about the Al Qaeda attacks while meeting with Florida pre-schoolers and quickly dashed from the room to save the country. The truth, it is now revealed, is that he was informed of the first attack on the World Trade Center before he even entered the schoolroom, and he decided to continue with his photo-op anyway. There he is on camera when Andrew Card informs him of the second plane and utters the fatal words, "We’re under attack!"—but he continues to read My Pet Goat for another seven minutes, his eyes sliding sideways in his puzzled face, like a moron looking for a bathroom, until his staff insists that he leave. (He stayed for another half hour.) If nothing else, that defining moment says volumes about what we can expect from the President of the U.S. in the center of a supreme, history-altering crisis: He’s just clueless.

And this man is the veritable king of the world. He can determine who is thrown into prison for as long as his minions see fit, with no hope of appeal, without even a lawyer. He can decide the fate of the earth with the touch of some buttons.

There are other moments that will impact some viewers and polarize others. So many, in fact, that you watch Fahrenheit 9/11 with disbelief, and leave shaking with rage. Sometimes sarcastic, always funny, Mr. Moore is armed with facts, and he presents them accurately and succinctly. The controversial filmmaker stated on the Today show that White House mouthpieces have denounced the film as "outrageously false" without seeing it, and right-wing Republicans have charged Mr. Moore with staging a "left-wing conspiracy" to influence the forthcoming election. Well, duh. For years, reactionary conservatives have been famous for staging right-wing conspiracies of their own to disgrace and discredit elected Democratic public officials. Maybe this is payback time. Whatever it is, everyone should see Fahrenheit 9/11 first—before debating the issues. The purpose of any documentary is to influence opinion. But instead of the customarily droning voice that comments on the action and tells you what to think, this one asks tough, logical questions, gets rational answers, and never loses its entertainment value.

This is a long and incredible review, and I urge you to read the entire thing. I never knew Rex Reed had it in him. I'm blown away.

Of course, having not been able to see the film yet, I can't say whether it is great or terrible. But I sure think I have a good idea. I'll confirm this on Friday, when I'll be the first ticketbuyer on line for the first performance in Arizona.

Note: I plan to write my own review of Fahrenheit 9/11 later this week. This is a look at some of the reviews to date.

I've always believed that Michael Moore needs to be taken with a gigantic grain of sea salt.

I've also always believed he is brilliant, funny, artistic, and a true muckracker. One must never rely on him for the entire story, whether it's in regard to guns in America, the Iraq war or Saudi influence over Bush. He is not a documentarian, he is an entertainer, a film maker and a propagandist. That doesn't mean he is not valid, or that he should be slighted or ridiculed. Quite the contrary.

I've been delighted to see the flood of positive reviews for Fahrenheit 9/11 today. Many of them make the same point, which is: Say what you will about Moore, but he is brilliant at what he does, and what he does is important.

Of course, at its roots, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is no laughing matter. It calls George Bush and his tight band of cronies a bunch of irresponsible fools who have led the United States into this war without reason. Does Moore play with the order of events or edit out parts of speeches or, in other words, manipulate the film and its viewers? Maybe, but he also backs himself up with corroborative facts.

Michael Moore's purpose as a filmmaker is to teach, unflinchingly, what those facts are. And he does so in gloriously rabble-rousing manner. He's a sort of modern day Thomas Paine, unafraid to say what he feels, and damn the establishment. After all, for those of us who believe in what he says, and shows, the establishment - in this case Bush - is all wrong.

The best single piece I've read is Andrew O'Hehir's review in Salon, which goes so far as to compare Moore to Dickens and Solzhenitsyn.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is an enormous film, an angry film, a flawed film and often a very, very funny film. There is anguish in it and death, and not as much coherence as there might be. It's a political screed that makes our commander in chief look like a simpering dolt (and also like the instrument of a massive machine he cannot control), but -- as in the horrifying scenes where Bush sits in that Florida classroom reading "The Pet Goat," clearly nonplussed, while people dive from the twin towers -- it is not entirely devoid of a certain curious compassion for him. It contains multitudes. In its bigness and rage, its low humor and its sentimentality, it has something of Whitman, something of Twain, something of Tom Paine. Love him or hate him, Michael Moore is becoming one of the signal artists of our age.

O'Hehir's most significant point is that moore is not a journalist, but a story teller. He has an agenda, he takes a side, he has a point to get across. The storytelling and the comedy -- Moore uses these to give you a picture you won't get from reading the NY Times.

My point is not to damn Moore as a fabricator, but rather to suggest that from early in his career there were signs that his true calling lay not in journalism but in storytelling, or, more specifically, in the dangerous and difficult territory that lies between them. In the years since "Roger and Me," he has become an increasingly skillful entertainer and propagandist, probably the closest American parallel to Dario Fo, the Italian radical clown, satirist and Nobel laureate. Moore might be understood as a court jester in the vein of King Lear's Fool, whose burlesques and exaggerations and farcical asides are meant to cast light into shadowy regions where the sober, scrupulously neutral Ivy League guys and gals of mainstream journalism dare not venture.

This is crucial. Some critics watch the movie looking for holes, the way Chrtistopher Hitchens did in a beautifully worded and terribly weak and silly review yesterday. Of course Moore is going to be slippery at times. He isn't documenting history so much as getting us to think. And in a world where so many outspoken "journalists" (Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, Horowitz, Shapiro, O'Reilly, etc.) go to criminal lengths to embellish what is actually being presented to us as journalism, I think Moore should actually be congratulated for having so few slippery spots in a work being presented as entertainment.

Maybe we need to look at Michael Moore the way we do at great war poets like Wilfred Owens, who I wrote about some months before. Bear with me for a moment. Owens is not really a reporter or a documentarian, and yet he is telling us the story of World War I as he sees it, from the very narrow perspective of a soldier experiencing the gore and the horrors of the battlefield. True, he doesn't give us perspective on the geo-political factors that led to the conflict, nor does he describe opposing points of view. It is just his story as he sees it, the flying streams of intestines of disemboweled young men, the soldiers chocking to death on gas as white froth oozes from their lungs.... It's not complete. It's not necessarily a fair picture. It paints a hideous portrait of the masters of war, sitting in their parlor rooms in London sipping Courvoisier as an entire generation is sent into the meat grinders in Ypres and Verdun and Gallipoli. But that does not make Owens' telling any less great or less important or less valid. Moore may not be quite on this level of artistic genius, and he may want to perceive himself as a teller of The Whole Story and of The Complete Truth. All I am saying is that I think this is where he really belongs, in the realm of the gifted storyteller, as O'Hehir says.

The NY Times offersa strikingly similar review of the movie, contending that whether you agree with Moore's worldview or not, the film's artistry and power make it a must-see.

It is worth seeing, debating and thinking about, regardless of your political allegiances.

Mr. Moore's populist instincts have never been sharper, and he is, as ever, at his best when he turns down the showmanship and listens to what people have to say. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is, along with everything else, an extraordinary collage of ordinary American voices: soldiers in the field, an Oregon state trooper patrolling the border, and, above all, citizens of Flint, Mich., Mr. Moore's hometown. The trauma that deindustrialization visited on that city was the subject of "Roger and Me," and that film remains fresh 15 years later, now that the volunteer army has replaced the automobile factory as the vehicle for upward mobility.

The most moving sections of "Fahrenheit 9/11" concern Lila Lipscomb, a cheerful state employee and former welfare recipient who wears a crucifix pendant and an American flag lapel pin. When we first meet her, she is proud of her family's military service — a daughter served in the Persian Gulf war and a son, Michael Pedersen, was a marine in Iraq — and grateful for the opportunities it has offered. Then Michael is killed in Karbala, and in sharing her grief with Mr. Moore, she also gives his film an eloquence that its most determined critics will find hard to dismiss. Mr. Bush is under no obligation to answer Mr. Moore's charges, but he will have to answer to Mrs. Lipscomb.

And let's not forget that even my nemesis, Fox News, gave the picture highest marks last week:

It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.

As much as some might try to marginalize this film as a screed against President George Bush, "F9/11" — as we saw last night — is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty — and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.

Most of the reviews note that, unlike Bowling for Columbine, Moore depends less on his silly gimmicks and narration and more on actual video clips, without his bloviating in the background. This lets the viewer do more of his own thinking -- although Moore no doubt wants to get his very pointed message across.

It looks as though, like it or not, Fahrenheit 9/11 is set to impact the nation in a way no other film ever has. I think we are so polarized it won't have much effect on most viewers in terms of changing whom they'll vote for. I certainly hope it becomes a hit among young people, notorious for not voting, not to mention the undecideds, who will have a big say in who our next president will be. After being pounded by the non-stop, deafening right-wing noise machine for years, Fahrenheit 9/11 should restore some terribly needed balance, despite Moore's mischievousness and biases.

Guest-blogging over at TPM, New Republic writer John Judis has a smart piece on America's irrational and self-injurious student visa policies in the wake of September 11.

The legislation establishing the Department of Homeland Security included a provision creating "Sevis." a database for keeping track of international students. Each student would have to register with the Sevis. Last October, the Department of Homeland Security proposed that in addition to the $100 visa fee, every prospective student would have to pay another $100 to fund Sevis. The payment would have to be through a credit card or dollars. Universities have not objected to the program itself; but they have objected strenuously to imposing another fee on foreign applicants. "Having yet another thing students have to do to come to the US that they don't have to do in any other part of the world will drive more people away at a time when enrollments are declining," said one official from the Association of International Educators.

The universities, of course, are understandably worried about declining enrollment, but what is most disturbing about the administration's program--and about its general approach to foreign students--is its hostile attitude toward the outside world. It's fortress America applied to educational policy. Such an approach won't necessarily prevent terrorist attacks, but it will in the long run encourage the anti-Americanism on which al Qaeda and other terrorist groups feed.

Judis begins the piece by pointing out how during the cold war, foreign students studying here was the best and cheapest way to promote democratic capitalism. And now we've made it next to impossible. This is a sore spot with me for personal reasons, and I just don't understand why our government is so obdurate on this issue, which does very little for our national security but hurts us in all sorts of ways.

Lying under oath is an impeachable offense. We should be especially concerned when it's about national security (as opposed to a blowjob).

All that hysteria over Clinton -- much of it justifiable, because he did a dumb, inappropriate thing. But if Ashcroft did what his critics are claiming, it's a whole different story. It's about falsifying the record of our country's national security preparedness just to cover Ashcroft's ass. Check out the post; our pompous, self-righteous, oh-so-religious attorney general may be in very hot water.

If this topic interests you, stop what you're doing and read this eye-opening article on how the Chinese media manipulate material and plays mind games with all involved -- its viewers and the experts its puts on CCTV.

The piece is written by one "Ann Condi," a pen name for an American journalist working for CCTV, and she (if it is a she) is sharp and brutal. She describes a panel discussion on how journalists present China to the modern world, which serves as a case study for the hypocrisy inherent to a government-controlled press. It's funny, it's incisive and it's infuriating.

Giving a quote or two from this article cannot do it justice; you have to read it all. Here is an example of the writer's pith.

The strategy of the Chinese government is to change the subject.

When complaints are lodged about the imprisoning of dissidents, the Chinese do not forthrightly proclaim “Indeed, we do put them in prison. We are justified in doing so. They are a threat to our security.” Instead they change the subject to “No country should interfere in the internal affairs of another country.” When America attacks China’s human rights record, the Chinese do not say “You are mistaken about our human rights problem, and here’s why.” Rather, they change the subject: “What about your human rights problem?”

All governments—all human beings—are guilty of this move, which in American parlance is called “spin”. But in China the technique has been reflexively applied for so long, it is now simply the default official approach to any awkward information whatsoever. A government that blocks any open discussion of its problems while tacitly admitting to them in this way cannot help developing pathological patterns of interaction, becoming both fiercely proud and profoundly embarrassed, as each act of blatant denial painfully highlights the stubborn reality. And sitting before us on the stage was the embodiment of this mentality.

There's much more to this article, including a description of how getting into the CCTV building is like getting into the War Room of the Pentagon. This was something I experienced myself once when I went to a Chinese radio station; I'll never forget it.

Just a side note: The panel was presided over by the beautiful emcee Shen Bing, who I used for a similar purpose when I managed an event in Beijing. She is sensational, and knows just how to keep things "lite and brisk." The perfect choice to keep the dialogue from getting too serious or uncomfortable. That's exactly why they chose her.

It appears that Hailey Xie, one of my favorite Chinese bloggers, is now at a new address. Be sure to check her out.

Or so say the latest reports. It looks like this is going to become a regular occurrence, with no end in sight. Such a stupid waste.

Watching the video yesterday of Kim Sung-il screaming, "I don't want to die," I tried to imagine the horror of the situation. I tried to get into his mind, and I tried to get into the minds of his captors. The former was easier than the latter. I just can't imagine being so hardened that it becomes acceptable, even honorable, to slit the throat of an innocent man who posed no threat. But then, that's what terrorism is all about, the slaughter of innocents, and there seem to be an awful lot of monsters willing to use it.

This barbarism is what many point to as proof that we must fight them with everything we've got and eliminate them. A completely understandable argument. But it also speaks to just how difficult, if not impossible, such a battle may be.

I don't have any answers right now, only questions and concerns as terrorism appears to prosper and spread with every new attempt to destroy it. A hydra, with an infinite number of heads.

Who would have believed it six months ago?

Bush Loses Advantage in War on Terrorism
Nation Evenly Divided on President, Kerry

Public anxiety over mounting casualties in Iraq and doubts about long-term consequences of the war continue to rise and have helped to erase President Bush's once-formidable advantage over Sen. John F. Kerry concerning who is best able to deal with terrorist threats, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Exactly half the country now approves of the way Bush is managing the U.S. war on terrorism, down 13 percentage points since April, according to the poll. Barely two months ago, Bush comfortably led Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, by 21 points when voters were asked which man they trusted to deal with the terrorist threat. Today the country is evenly divided, with 48 percent preferring Kerry and 47 percent favoring Bush.

With fewer than 10 days before the United States turns over governing power to Iraq, the survey shows that Americans are coming to a mixed judgment about the costs and benefits of the war. Campaign advisers to both Bush and Kerry believe voters' conclusions about Bush and Iraq will play a decisive role in determining the outcome of the November election.

Of course, terrorism and national security are the crown jewels of the Bush campaign. With those lost, what does he have to stand on? The economy is getting better, but most of the recovery is being enjoyed on the corporate and not the individual level. Iraq is the issue. It represents so much of how the Bush White House operates in terms of making decisions, keeping secrets, telling lies, aggrandizing itself ("Mission Accomplished"), breaking the law and flip-flopping at every turn.

It is deeply ironic that what was only six month's ago the administration's diamond necklace has transmogrified into the hangman's noose. As evidence mounts that Iraq has cost us the war on terror, there will simply be no way out.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum has a great post on this poll with a vivid graphic. He comes to interesting conclusions.

I happened to run into Hugh Hewitt at lunch again today — he lives right across the freeway from me — and in an effort to keep up a facade of good cheer he offered to make a bet: if Kerry wins he turns over his blog to me for a week; if Bush wins he gets my blog for a week.

I laughed and returned to my sandwich, which is probably a good thing for Hugh. Terrorism is central to Bush's chances this November, and if his approval ratings on terrorism aren't at least 10 points ahead of Kerry by October, he's going down in flames.

Which is exactly what's happened to every other president who's won office with fewer popular votes than his opponent. One termers all.

Update 2: Billmon found this to be the poll's highlight:

Q: Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?

Approve: 47%
Disapprove: 51%
No opinion: 1%

Q: Thinking back to when Bill Clinton was in office, would you say you approve or disapprove of the way Clinton handled his job as president?

Approve: 62%
Disapprove: 37%
No opinion: 1%

Interesting: Apparently it's not inconceivable that both the Libertarian and Constitution Parties might siphon votes away from Bush, even to the point of tipping the election.

The main theme of these parties is that the present administration is out of control when it comes to spending and is not living up to its ideals of reduced government. Both also call for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

This could get interesting. We've been recording the increasing dissatisfaction of conservative pundits, and it seems that it might be spreading. (The article notes that the two parties are doing a good job of appealing to citizens at the grassroots level.) Could Bush be threatened by his very own Ralph Naders? Let's keep our fingers crossed.

If this is a topic of interest, you absolutely must read this great review of three books on how China has dealt with its Moslems in the west. The critic makes some brilliant points about how China deals with troublesome minorities. Even scarier, however, is how the US has abetted this oppression by giving it legitimacy under our "war on terror."

Susan Estrich, a Fox commentator and former manager of the Dukakis presidential campaign, just said there is no way Kerry can choose anyone but Edwards for his VP. Her arguments are good: So many of Kerry's followers (like me) will be devastated if he chooses anyone else, and Kerry knows it. Gephardt just doesn't cut it for these people, and Kerry knows it. Edwards will give the ticket an infusion of Southern charm and youthful energy, and Kerry knows it. It's already a done deal, she said on tonight's O'Reilly Factor.

This was music to my ears, but it has to be remembered that just a few days ago pundits were predicting it would be Gephardt. So I'll hold back my enthusiasm until I hear it from John Kerry's mouth. But I sure feel a lot more upbeat today than I did last week.

These guidelines for talking about the Iraq war in a manner that associates it with 9/11 were prepared by Republican pollster/strategist Frank Luntz. It's a pdf file so I can't cut and paste, but some of these points are quite revealing.

Remember, I've always said the Republicans are masterful when it comes to singing from the same songbook and staying "on-message." That's thanks to documents like this. I don't like the Republicans' messages, which are based on deception, but I admire their organization and their appreciation of coordinated communication. The Democrats need to learn to do the same: idenitfy your key messages, articulate them with compelling and powerful language, and never waiver from them.

The notes were discovered by Atrios -- thanks.

He sure gives a great interview -- and it brought back all sorts of nostalgic memories of a president who could actually hold a conversation without leaning on platitudes and talking points.

From Patriotboy:

Klinton dishonors Our Leader

Like many of you, I watched Klinton's disgraceful acceptance of responsibility for the Lewinsky Scandal last night on 60 Minutes. He did not try to lie his way out of it or blame it on an underling. It's as if he believes that it's acceptable for a President to admit to making mistakes.

If Our Leader had been in Klinton's position, he'd have done the honorable thing and blamed the White House cigar provisioner. He'd do so with the knowledge that today, Rush would back him up by railing against tobacconists, O'Reilly would be calling for a boycott of wrapper leaf from the Dominican Republic, and Coulter would have killed some elderly Cuban cigar roller in Tampa with a homemade shiv. By next week, no patriotic American would dare voice the slightest doubt about presidential infallibility. That's Bush Era leadership--the kind of leadership we missed during the Klinton years.

"Presidential infallibility" -- now that is priceless.

It's the 10-year anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman and needless to say the airwaves are jammed with stories about "the trial of the century."

I watched all the usual suspects on Larry King last night -- Goldman's father and sister, Lt. Vanatter, LA detective Lange, Nicole's sister -- telling all the usual stories about what a circus the trial was and how poorly Judge Ito and Marcia Clark handled things, what a theatrical grandstander Johnny Cochrane was, how Clark didn't let the jurors see the most damning evidence, how Cochrane shamelessly played the race card, etc., etc., etc., etc.

Let me say right up front that I tend to believe all of these things. We all do. It is simply a matter of fact that OJ Simpson murdered Ron and Nicole -- or at least it is a matter of fact that this is what we all believe. There was no one on King's cozy little panel, or on any of the other rehash shows on TV I've seen, who stand up for OJ and say he was innocent.

This is exactly why you should take a look at Joseph Bosco's article on this subject. His conclusions are diametrically opposed to those we've been fed by the media and the victims' families. It's a long piece with lots of names you've never heard before, and it isn't always easy reading. But Joseph does have unique credentials to tell this story: he was one of the tiny handful of journalists selected to sit in the courthouse and cover the story every day. He has met and interviewed all of the characters. And he has a long history of forensic journalism.

I admit, I am not convinced by Joseph's argument becuase I don't yet understand it well enough. After "knowing" that OJ did it for 10 years, it is very hard to re-adjust your thought patterns even to entertain the possibility that this might not be so. And I haven't done it yet. But if what Joseph is saying is true, we may be forced to do exactly that, because this case may not be over yet.

Joseph has a lot of courage to come out with a story that flies in the face of everything we know and believe. Some critics have slammed his book on the trial (A Problem of Evidence), claiming the Cochrane crowd hijacked him and managed to convince him their BS story was true. (Knowing Joseph personally, I find this just about impossible to swallow.)

[UPDATE: See Joseph's comment below for clarification of his book's conclusions.]

Not having read Joseph's book yet, I have to say I'm in a holding pattern right now, still believing that OJ did it, but willing to listen if new evidence surfaces to show otherwise. But before you start insisting that everything the Larry King panelists say is true (as I tend to do), keep an open mind and see what Joseph has to say in his article. I was definitely surprised.

Thomas Friedman explores why this is so important to so many students, and just how far they're willing to go to make their dream come true.

If anti-Americanism is on the rise around the world, no one told the kids in the student visa line at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The quest among Chinese students for visas to study in America, say U.S. Embassy officials, has become so intense that it has spawned Internet chat rooms, where Chinese students swap stories about which arguments work best with which U.S. consular officials and even give them names like "Amazon Goddess," "Too Tall Baldy" and "Handsome Guy."

Just how closely Chinese students strategize over the Internet on how to get visas to America — at a time when fewer are being given for security reasons — was revealed to the embassy recently when on one day one consular officer had scores of students come through with the same line, which some chat room had suggested would work: "I want to go to America to become a famous professor." After hearing this all day, he was surprised to get one student who came before him and pronounced, "My mom has an artificial limb and I want to build a better artificial leg for my mom and that is why I want to study in the U.S." The consular officer was so relieved to hear a new line that he told the young man: "You know, this is the best story I've heard this morning. I really salute you. I'm going to give you a visa."

You guessed it. The next day every other student who showed up at the embassy said he or she wanted to go to America to learn how to build "a better artificial limb for my mother." Said one U.S. official: "We have to be so careful what we say, because it gets into the chat rooms right away."

Friedman also explores an obvious dichotomy: Anti-Americanism is at an all time high thanks to our "president," and yet more students than ever are passionate about wanting to come here. Of course, under Bush we have made it all but impossible for these students to get their wish, and Friedman says that under a smarter, more forward-thinking president this wretched situation would and should be corrected.

I'm completely serious. Danwei's got the scoop, as usual.

More of the same, as China's rulers seek to stem the tide of materials that could lead to "social instability."

China's Internet police stepped up an ongoing campaign to control the web by issuing new measures to crackdown on "unhealthy" Internet content, state press said.

A circular issued by the Ministry of Information Industry has unveiled a series of measures to regulate content, crackdown on unregistered Internet bars and step up controls over online bulletin boards and chatrooms, Xinhua news agency said.

The measures will also ensure that Internet information providers refrain from spreading "information threatening national security or social stability," or containing superstitious or erotic content, it said....

Chinese websites, Internet service providers (ISPs) and other Internet-related organizations were also urged to sign an agreement setting up principles of "self-discipline" and self-policing of the Internet, Xinhua said in a separate article.

Censorship, fear and repression, the golden rule for the CCP to hold onto power, even in the age of great reform. Sorry if that sounds polemical, but it's just the way it is.

Funny, how one idiotic suggestion from the US Defense Department can spark a frenzy of angst and debate.

China should withdraw its undertaking on no first-use of nuclear weapons should Taiwan try to blow up the Three Gorges Dam, according to some parliamentary delegates.

The call was made by them - as well as some who sit on the country's top political advisory body - in the wake of a recent US Defence Department report which suggested that Taiwan could target the dam in a pre-emptive strike.

That study sparked off a public debate in Taiwan on developing a military offensive strategy. In response, delegates to China's National People's Congress, the de facto parliament, and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference wrote to the central government in Beijing, calling for it to revise its no-first-use pledge on nuclear weapons.

Their argument is that the undertaking needs to be changed now that the country is facing hostile forces planning attacks against its densely populated regions and the dam, the world's biggest hydroelectric project.

They feel that such strikes should be viewed as terrorist attacks and that China should use nuclear weapons as a deterrence.

Talk about opening a can of worms. Next time I hope we can be a bit more discreet when we make recommendations that, if ever carried out, would result in the deaths of untold millions of civilians.

Right now we're watching the Bush people do the same two-step they've done before when they get caught in their bullshit.

The last time it was the weapons of mass destruction which, we were all told prior to the invasion, the Iraqis had amassed in lethal stockpiles. When this turned out not to be the case, Bush could have been honest and said we were wrong. He could have said a mistake was made. Instead, he played wordgames. We had found "weapons of mass-destruction-related program activities" (whatever the hell that means, and that is an exact quote from his last SOTU address). And that justified things. A shift in language, a bit of parsing and re-adjusting, and he squirmed off the hook.

Would you have sacrificed your loved ones for "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities"? Of course not, and that's not what he said before the attack. It was deadly stockpiles posing a threat that needed to be dealt with at once.

Now it's whether or not he ever led us all to believe there was a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam. Same thing all over again -- Bush and Cheney never really said that, what they really said was parse parse parse....

But we all know that drawing a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam was a major factor in the administration's convincing the American people that this was a war worth fighting, a war worth sacrificing the blood of their children and husbands and fathers. Bush needed to wrap it in the immediacy of September 11, as a centerpiece of his imaginary war on terror.

But today, with the bipartisan commission's statement that there was no connection of any significance between Saddam and al Qaeda, Bush has to move the furniture around again. The new line is we never said Saddam was involved in 911 -- and while that's technically true, they definitely embarked on a disinformation campaign to foment the idea and then did nothing to set the record straight.

This is all documented by Spencer Ackerman, sitting in for Josh Marshall and doing a great job. He gives Bush's and Cheney's exact quotes with the dates and the links. There is simply no argument. These two shysters consciously and consistently campaigned to convince the man on the street that Saddam was a terrorist threat with deep and meaningful ties to al Qaeda.

Now that it's many months later, they're trying to say we never really said that, just like we never really said Saddam's weapons posed an imminent threat. They could prove in court they didn't actually say the precise words -- but the record shows that they did indeed say it, though they chose their words with legalistic care. These guys are good. They're smooth -- especially Cheney. I admire them, even as I'm repulsed by them.

Whatever you do, check out the actual record of what was said, both by Cheney/Bush and the 911 Commission. It's all in the TPM post, which is essential reading for those who really want a sense of perspective. The record speaks for itself: Bush and Cheney are liars and scoundrels.

Update: As Billmon mulls over the same topic of Bush-age doublespeak, he offers this quote, that says it all:

George Orwell
1984

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Another decapitation. Photos here. The media shouldn't "protect" us from the photos and videos, as they are doing. We need to all see for ourselves what the murderers are capable of. The media showed us Abu Ghraib and there's no reason to shield us from images of terrorist butchery.

The terrorists are certainly living up to their carefully cultivated reputation. So what do we do? Has anything been accomplished as a result of our war on terror? Are we any safer? I really don't know, but it seemed we were making some progress while we were focused on Afghanistan, and then everything seemed to deteriorate with Iraq and Abu Ghraib. It's too soon to make sense out of this puzzle, but I see absolutely no reason for any optimism.

Update: I just heard Cheney and then Bush speak briefly about the murder, with the usual, "We will track each and every one of the killers down. This will not stand...." But isn't that just what we heard about Bin Laden and al Qaeda after 911 -- and don't they seem, in an odd way, to have been made even more dangerous in their diaspora? And hasn't it been two and a half years? With new mini-bin Ladens being created daily by the militant Islam hatred mill, are we caught forever in a black hole, with no way out, ever?

Sorry for all the questions, but my febrile brain is on overdrive.

I heard someone on the news last night put forward what seemed like the most ridiculous and impossible notion: We must, he said, meet with the terrorists and negotiate in some way.

Treason! Impossible! They butchered 3,000 Americans and beheaded Nick Berg and America never negotiates with terrorists!

He acknowledged this, but said it still has to be done, and that is the only way nightmares like this are ever resolved. He pointed to Israel finally talking with Yasser Arafat -- a disaster in the end but an important step nevertheless. Under Reagan, of course, we negotiated secretly with Iranian terrorists to free American hostages. This fellow said there's simply no other way, and that the odds are right now behind the scenes someone in the US government is communicating with someone either in al Qaeda or with connections to them.

I am as sickened as anyone else at the thought of ever, ever talking with al Qaeda. And judging from the way they talk about the US, it'd be hard to believe they're that hot to talk with us. And besides, could we ever trust a thing they say? Don't they make Kim Jong Il and Mao look like little darlings?

But all that said, is there any other practical way to really "win"? Is this the kind of war where we can simply shoot our way to victory, considering that the enemy has fanned out across the globe -- and considering that we are bogged down in a stupid and failed effort in the one country al Qaeda isn't. (And yeah, I know about al Zarkawi, America's new bogey man and source of all evil, a Jordanian with no proven ties to either bin Laden or Saddam.)

Well, I seem to have veered off topic a bit, but it was healthy to get all those thoughts down on "paper." Now, let's get on with our splendid war on terror. Onward, Christian soldiers.

Oh, how sweet it is.

I almost threw a book at the TV set last night when Hannity insisted we had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, just as Bush said we would. This great article walks you through his lies one by one.

Stephen Frost does the English-speaking world a great service with his summary of a Chinese article on a tale of real badness.

Under the guise of helping the poor, a school offering free courses for impoverished students from Hubei instead contracted them to Guangdong hotels where they worked in manual jobs.

The Huanggang Commercial and Hotel Management School pretended to help impoverished families in Hubei by providing free courses to 120 students aged 14 and above. Instead it teamed up with a company offering hotel consultancy services in the southern city of Dongguan to provide cheap labour to good quality hotels.

Students were promised a two-year course, but after four months on campus in Hubei they were sent to Dongguan on "internships". In reality, the students learnt nothing about management and spent their time cleaning and in other manual tasks....

The hotels punished students more harshly for failing to obey regulations than regular staff, which often resulted in them working longer hours. Several students tried to escape but because the company held their household registration permits and contracts they were effectively imprisoned.

I am really curious -- what is the definition of slave labor? Does this qualify? It seems to me the one thing that differentiates it is that the slaves workers at least were paid something, albeit next to nothing. But if you are trapped, if you cannot flee, and you are forced to do work against your will, are you a slave?

The article says this is going on at several "good hotels." I wonder if that means 5-stars, like the Marriott, Hilton or St. Regis. I hope we get to hear more about this story, with all the details. It sounds like a scandal waiting to be told.

Thanks to Conrad for pointing me to this.

Ross Terrill's a brilliant historian and his look at Taiwan's election and its ramifications offers a condensed primer on Taiwan politics. Anyone interested in what's going on over there has to read it.

I enjoyed especially his closing paragraphs.

Beyond Chen's second term, many possibilities will arise. Taiwan will never depart from China. Geography dictates it; to a degree cultural roots also dictate it. To be independent of China is not necessarily to be hostile to China.

For the moment, however, a regime exists in Beijing that is myopic about democracy. It says "Hitler was produced by democracy" and this led to the destruction of the Jews. It hints that Russia's turn toward democracy is regrettable.

To all this there is one answer, which, alas, no party-state has ever accepted. Democracy is a method for a free people to handle its differences. It doesn't guarantee a fully happy outcome each time. But the self-realization of the individual -- the highest value in politics -- can ask nothing less than just that freedom to choose.

Fifty years ahead no one can say where China's boundaries will lie. One China can live on as a gleam in the eye for some. Washington must say Taiwan's future is an open question subject to the free choice of all the people involved. I believe it should add that for now the extension of Beijing's party-state rule to Taiwan is not feasible or in America's or East Asia's interests.

I hope we all agree.

I suppose in a country going through the horrors of a never-ending famine, it's not surprising that it points to pine needles as a wonderful source of nutrition.

Only in "The People's Democratic Republic of Korea." Via my nemesis, James Taranto.

This article (which is more like a long string of quotes)l ooks into this controversial question and concludes that companies like Nortel can't shrug off such charges by saying the technology they sell to China is no different from what they sell elsewhere. The writer obviously finds them guilty as charged.

“Nortel’s position on this is criminal from a moral perspective..it is absolutely scandalous,” lawyer Clive Ansley, a Vancouver Island-based expert on Chinese legal issues, told The Asian Pacific Post.

“What this company is doing is basically telling China that we at Nortel can help you track down activists and free speech advocates,” said Ansley, a former professor of Chinese studies and Chinese law in Canada, who was the first foreign lawyer to open a law office in Shanghai.

“Instead of implementing laws to control the export of such technology that results in scores being rounded up, jailed and even killed, the Liberal government has been handing out tax dollars to companies like Nortel.

“This is indicative of the close links the Liberals have with China’s trade and corporate community and human rights is not part of the deal.

“The Liberal government believes that this process of engagement which leads to millions of tax dollars going to China will help the communist regime become more democratic and respect human rights.

“That is like trying to teach a tiger to be a vegetarian,” said Ansley, who spent the last 20 years in China and Taiwan.

The article has heaps of quotes from others, all condemning Canada's Liberal government for its tax breaks to Nortel, but the reader needs to beware: the article appears to be quite political, at moments reading as though it were campaign literature for the Conservative party.

It would have been a much better article if it took a practical look at what exactly the Nortel technology does, and if it's any more sinister than what it offers to everybody in other countries.

Oh shit.

If it happens, I'll still campaign for him. But I will be extremely, painfully disappointed. Not fatally. But almost.

This story has all kinds of implications, none of them pretty, about how big corporations screw the American public, and how the government goes way out of its way to protect them. It's highway robbery, dressed up in suits and ties.

And guess what company used to provide the Bush campaign with its corporate jet back in 2000?

Update: Go here now to hear the funny/depressing Enron song, made up of lines from the notorious Enron tapes spliced into rock song "I've Got the Power (along with a line or two from George Bush). Via BoingBoing.

It's an amazing story. A stubby, unshaven guy who wears a baseball cap pulls off one of the greatest public relations coups in the history of the film industry. Michael Moore managed, by dumb luck or Machiavellian cunning or a combination of the two, to win front-page headlines for Fahrenheit 9/11 again and again and again, week after week after week. This is an amazing story, and a case study of how to achieve maximum publicity for your movie. College communications courses will be pointing to this story for years to come.

While I realize this idiotic story has been way oveplayed, and even though I just posted about it a little while ago, I couldn't resist citing this Pravda article, which doesn't display a lot of love toward China.

Chinese leaders just love criticizing the "American imperialists", despite the fact that the trade with the USA bring China billions of dollars every year. Although, the "imperialists" are constantly giving Beijing the grounds for exercising their criticism.

In May Pentagon submitted to the US Congress its annual report on the state and perspectives of the Chinese military. Beijing probably would not pay much attention to the report, but the US military experts touched such painful issues for the Chinese as Taiwan and hydroelectric power station "Three Ravines" which is under construction.

The Chinese leaders were indignant with the advice Pentagon was giving to Taiwan in case of possible war with China: to blow up the constructed hydroelectric power station "Three Ravines" on the Yangtze River.

The Chinese leaders started cursing at the USA in anger. Lieutenant-General Lyu Yan called Washington the "whore posing itself like a gentleman" in his comment on the Pentagon's report, Reuters wrote. According to the general, Americans are not better than Osam binLaden as they admit the possibility of such operations.

I didn't even know Pravda existed anymore. They'd be well served hiring a good English proofreader.

Danwei, ever vigilant, has the story.

For those who may have forgotten, Harisu is the gorgeous Korean model readers were salivating over until they learned she used to be a he.

Update: Apparently the Korean transexual sensation is also working as a sex counselor. Busy lady. (Link via a commenter below.)

Matthew Yglesias fears it's a done deal -- Richard Gephard will run as Kerry's VP.

If true, there isn't much that could make me more depressed. Kerry has his own personality issues, and thus he needs someone like John Edwards or John McCain (yeah, I'm still dreaming) or Wesley Clark or Bill Richardson .... or just about anyone but Gephard.

Gephardt is a tired old Democrat owned by the unions and devoid of anything resembling a personality. Read the Yglesias article to see why this would be a disaster for all concerned -- except Bush and the Republicans.

Kerry has to be smarter than this -- he has to know that a bright, energetic young Southerner like Edwards would give his ticket the injection of charisma and vitality it needs. Right?

I know that Kerry likes Gephardt more than the others on his short list, but since when does a president have to like his VP? John, this is a strategic decision to help you get elected, as when JFK picked the detested LBJ as his running mate. If you have to, hold your nose and pick Edwards (actually that sounds kind of gross, but you know what I mean). But if you go ahead and pick Gephardt, all bets are off. It will confirm the worst fears that you're just another old liberal with no new ideas and no vision and no sense of courage and daring. Please, say it isn't so.

Update: Just yesterday, polls show Edwards is the No. 1 choice.

A Chinese general has warned Taiwain in bellicose language not to even think about attacking the Three Gorges Dam.

A Chinese general has warned Taiwan against attacking the massive Three Gorges Dam, saying China's retaliation would "blot out the sky and cover the Earth."

Taiwan's military said last week that it has no intention of ever attacking the dam on the Yangtze River in central China - the world's biggest hydroelectric project. Yet the issue drew widespread attention in China after a U.S. Defence Department report suggested the island's leaders were thinking of developing missiles that could strike mainland Chinese targets such as the dam to deter an attack.

"That wouldn't prevent a war. That would have the reverse effect," a Chinese general identified as Liu Yuan wrote in the official newspaper China Youth Daily.

"No normal person would be willing to pay the price of self-destruction if it were to bring retaliation that would blot out the sky and cover the Earth," Liu wrote....

"The Three Gorges Dam will not collapse. It cannot be destroyed," he wrote.

The dam that God himself couldn't destroy.

Personally, I find this whole thing a great candidate for dumbest news story of the year. The Pentagon should never have made its dumbass suggestion and it should never have been allowed to reach the media.

Check out Tom's post on Fox News getting censured in the UK for its irresponsible reporting on last year's BBC controvery. "Heh."

This is a welcome surprise.

In a case widely seen as testing the limits of press freedom in China, a court has slashed the prison sentences of two senior newspaper executives who were convicted on embezzlement and bribery charges, the Xinhua news agency said yesterday.

The Intermediate Court in Guangzhou cut former Southern Metropolitan Daily general manager Yu Huafeng's 12-year term to eight years, Xinhua said.

Former editor-in-chief Li Minying's sentence was reduced from 11 to six years.

It's certainly a good thing, although the article doesn't give much insight into why the court did this. Next, I'm hoping we here something about the fate of the paper's editor Cheng Yizhong, waiting in jail with no information on what he's being charged with.

Anyone who believes Abu Ghraib was overblown by the media, that it can be swept away by courtmartialing six or seven kid soldiers, that the Nick Berg decapitation should have been a bigger story, that the worst is over or that America is seen in the same light as it was before is only fooling him/herself.

According to the fiercely intelligent (and often infuriating) Christopher Hitchens, this "moral Chernobyl" is about to come catapulting back in a way most of us aren't prepared for. It seems like a hundred years ago that Rumsfeld leaked to the world that there were "more pictures" and videos, already seen by members of Congress, and Hitchens has it on good authority the cat's about to come leaping out of the bag.

It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ("I'm outraged more by the outrage") have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see. And one linguistic reform is in any case already much overdue. The silly word "abuse" will have to be dropped. No law or treaty forbids "abuse," but many conventions and statutes, including our own and the ones we have urged other nations to sign, do punish torture—which is what we are talking about here at a bare minimum.

Hitchens makes a lot of sense as to why torture in any form is to be avoided at all costs, even in the case of the "ticking time bomb."

I'm still amazed when I visit the warbloggers, and see their commenters saying that this is a dead issue, it's under investigation and the military is demonstrating how well they have things under control. And they believe this, in the face of the memos and the obvious scapegoating and the fact that most of those we felt it was necessary to torture have since been released from Abu Ghraib -- that's how dangerous they were. That's what a threat they posed.

For proof of just how profoundly this has affected our image, just look at the latest poll numbers from Iraq.

A poll of Iraqis commissioned by the U.S.-backed government has provided the Bush administration a stark picture of anti-American sentiment — more than half of Iraqis believe they would be safer if U.S. troops simply left.

The poll, commissioned by the Coalition Provisional Government last month but not released to the American public, also found radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is surging in popularity, 92 percent of Iraqis consider the United States an occupying force and more than half believe all Americans behave like those portrayed in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse photos.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of a multimedia presentation about the poll that was shown to U.S. officials involved in developing Iraq policy. Several officials said in interviews the results reinforced feelings that the transfer of power and security responsibilities to the Iraqis can't come too soon.

"If you are sitting here as part of the coalition, it (the poll) is pretty grim," said Donald Hamilton, a career foreign service officer who is working for Ambassador Paul Bremer's interim government and helps oversee the CPA's polling of Iraqis.

Abu Ghraib. It may not be a fair picture of America, it may be out of proportion, and it is certainly unfortunate in every way. But it's our legacy. In the minds of so many, it is who America is. Nothing can ever be the same after Abu Ghraib.

Just one more thing to worry about. What can you do?

No, I'm not joking, though it sure sounds far-fetched:

Iran reportedly is readying troops to move into Iraq if U.S. troops pull out, leaving a security vacuum.

The Saudi daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat, monitored in Beirut, reports Iran has massed four battalions at the border.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat quoted "reliable Iraqi sources" as saying, "Iran moved part of its regular military forces towards the Iraqi border in the southern sector at a time its military intelligence agents were operating inside Iraqi territory."

And that's all we know for now. Maybe Chalabi really will end up running Iraq after we leave. Oh, what a mess.

[Via No More Mister Nice Blog.]

A wingnut web site is asking its visitors to jam the e-mailboxes of theater owners with pleas not to show Michael Moore's subversive and anti-American movie Fahrenheit 9/11.

Let's not allow them get anywhere with this. Let's send our own emails to the theater owners congratulating them on the courage and good judgement they're demonstrating by showing this important movie under such short notice. Here's how to reach them:

brian_blatchley@loewscpx.com
michael_norris@loewscpx.com
kerry_moots@loewscpx.com
John_mccauley@loewscpx.com
john_walker@loewscpx.com
maura_Campbell@loewscpx.com

Oh, and to those of you who are convinced Fahrenheit 9/11 is a radical commie al-Qaeda-sponsored propaganda piece, be sure to read this great review -- by Fox News. (You heard me right.)

The crowd that gave Michael Moore's controversial "Fahrenheit 9/11" documentary a standing ovation last night at the Ziegfeld Theater premiere certainly didn't have to be encouraged to show their appreciation. From liberal radio host/writer Al Franken to actor/director Tim Robbins, Moore was in his element.

But once "F9/11" gets to audiences beyond screenings, it won't be dependent on celebrities for approbation. It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.

As much as some might try to marginalize this film as a screed against President George Bush, "F9/11" — as we saw last night — is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty — and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.

Readers of this column may recall that I had a lot of problems with Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," particularly where I thought he took gratuitous shots at helpless targets such as Charlton Heston. "Columbine" too easily succeeded by shooting fish in a barrel, as they used to say.

Can you believe it? Rage against Moore all you want -- just be sure to see the movie first, so you know what you're talking about.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Kos say the plan to scare off the theater owners is, in the George Bush tradition, a miserable failure.

Last week, during the never-ending funeral of our 40th president, only one moment jumped out at me as remarkable, and that was Ron Reagan Jr.'s eulogy in which he took an obvious swipe at our current president.

Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians - wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.

I thought it was a wonderful moment, providing some much needed balance. In case anyone hadn't noticed, Bush and his handlers took enormous strides last week to wrap the president in Reagan's mantle. His campaign site was overhauled to look like an online Reagan museum. Bush, who is so quick to accuse the other side of "politicizing" issues, had no shame when it came to politicizing Reagan's death and making it not just a theme but the very cornerstone of his campaign, at least temporarily.

As the above article says, Ron Reagan's jab at Bush last week was not the first, and it's clear he has little respect for the shrub who would be president. Check out this Salon article for the history of this animosity.

[Ron] Reagan took a swipe at Bush during the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, which featured a tribute to his father, telling the Washington Post's Lloyd Grove, "The big elephant sitting in the corner is that George W. Bush is simply unqualified for the job... What's his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?" Since then he's been quiet about the current occupant of the White House -- until now....

"Sure, he wasn't a technocrat like Clinton. But my father was a man -- that's the difference between him and Bush. To paraphrase Jack Palance, my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush."

Reagan says he doesn't have anything personal against Bush. He met him only once, at a White House event during the Reagan presidency. "At least my wife insists we did -- he left absolutely no impression on me. But Doria remembers him very negatively -- I can't repeat what she said about him, I'd rather not use profanity. I do remember Jeb -- a big fella, seemed to be the brightest of the bunch. And of course their parents were very charming."

But Reagan has strong feelings about Bush's policies, including the war in Iraq, which he ardently opposes. "Nine-11 gave the Bush people carte blanche to carry out their extreme agenda -- and they didn't hesitate for a moment to use it. I mean, by 9/12 Rumsfeld was saying, 'Let's hit Iraq.' They've used the war on terror to justify everything from tax cuts to Alaska oil drilling."

Not that his father was a saint when it came to military adventures, tax cuts and the environment. But I have to give Reagan Junior enormous credit for having the courage and intelligence to go on the record with his opinions and to do so when the eyes of the entire world were upon him last weekend. This, combined with his mother's obvious rancor at Bush's irrational policy on stem cell research, should help help add some additional cracks to Bush's crumbling foundation. Enough cracks and the whole things crashes down. So bring 'em on.

In comments to my previous post, the issue of Ashcroft's badness is briefly discussed. Conrad commented that (paraphrase) Janet Reno is more despicable because of the deaths at Waco, but I don't buy the comparison. Waco was an awful mistake and a tragedy, but it did not typify Reno's performance or her concept of what being attorney general means. Ashcroft is consistently dreadful on a daily basis. And dangerous, too.

There are few members of the Bush team that I truly "hate." Hate is a strong word and if you throw it around a lot it loses its power. I reserve it for the very worst, like Ashcroft.

There was good reason so many of us feared the appointment of a backward-thinking pentecostal to oversee the Justice Department. These fears have been justified many times over, and Paul Krugman today summarizes them in a column that's sure to raise lots of eyebrows. It's brilliant, and I urge you to read the entire thing.

Travesty of Justice By PAUL KRUGMAN

No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.

For this column, let's just focus on Mr. Ashcroft's role in the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn't even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure.

We can't tell directly whether Mr. Ashcroft's post-9/11 policies are protecting the United States from terrorist attacks. But a number of pieces of evidence suggest otherwise.

First, there's the absence of any major successful prosecutions. The one set of convictions that seemed fairly significant — that of the "Detroit 3" — appears to be collapsing over accusations of prosecutorial misconduct. (The lead prosecutor has filed a whistle-blower suit against Mr. Ashcroft, accusing him of botching the case. The Justice Department, in turn, has opened investigations against the prosecutor. Payback? I report; you decide.)

Then there is the lack of any major captures. Somewhere, the anthrax terrorist is laughing. But the Justice Department, you'll be happy to know, is trying to determine whether it can file bioterrorism charges against a Buffalo art professor whose work includes harmless bacteria in petri dishes.

Perhaps most telling is the way Mr. Ashcroft responds to criticism of his performance. His first move is always to withhold the evidence. Then he tries to change the subject by making a dramatic announcement of a terrorist threat.

For an example of how Mr. Ashcroft shuts down public examination, consider the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former F.B.I. translator who says that the agency's language division is riddled with incompetence and corruption, and that the bureau missed critical terrorist warnings. In 2002 she gave closed-door Congressional testimony; Senator Charles Grassley described her as "very credible . . . because people within the F.B.I. have corroborated a lot of her story."

But the Justice Department has invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege" to prevent Ms. Edmonds from providing evidence. And last month the department retroactively classified two-year-old testimony by F.B.I. officials, which was presumably what Mr. Grassley referred to.

For an example of changing the subject, consider the origins of the Jose Padilla case. There was no publicity when Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002. But on June 6, 2002, Coleen Rowley gave devastating Congressional testimony about failures at the F.B.I. (which reports to Mr. Ashcroft) before 9/11. Four days later, Mr. Ashcroft held a dramatic press conference and announced that Mr. Padilla was involved in a terrifying plot. Instead of featuring Ms. Rowley, news magazine covers ended up featuring the "dirty bomber" who Mr. Ashcroft said was plotting to kill thousands with deadly radiation.

Since then Mr. Padilla has been held as an "enemy combatant" with no legal rights. But Newsweek reports that "administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention — that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological `dirty bomb' — has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used in court."

But most important is the memo. Last week Mr. Ashcroft, apparently in contempt of Congress, refused to release a memo on torture his department prepared for the White House almost two years ago. Fortunately, his stonewalling didn't work: The Washington Post has acquired a copy of the memo and put it on its Web site.

Much of the memo is concerned with defining torture down: if the pain inflicted on a prisoner is less than the pain that accompanies "serious physical injury, such as organ failure," it's not torture. Anyway, the memo declares that the federal law against torture doesn't apply to interrogations of enemy combatants "pursuant to [the president's] commander-in-chief authority." In other words, the president is above the law.

The memo came out late Sunday. Mr. Ashcroft called a press conference yesterday — to announce an indictment against a man accused of plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio. The timing was, I'm sure, purely coincidental.

That new website the Chinese government is providing the people to rat out sites they don't like -- or sites run by people they want to get revenge on -- is being carefully positioned as an anti-pornography site. In fact, parents all throughout the Mainland are breathing a sigh of relief, knowing their children will go to bed a little bit safer, a little more protected against the dangers of dirty pictures, thanks to the Great Cyber Nanny and her new scare-you-to-death informer site.

People, especially parents, generally applauded the opening of the website.

"It's good for fostering a healthy environment for the growth of our kids," said a netizen.

(Great journalism, too.)

Of course, we all know better. This is the kind of informer system that would make Chairman Mao or Comrade Beria or Secretary Ashcroft or Heinrich Himmler proud. It's a huge step backward for freedom of expression in China, making just about anyone prone to accusations of posting "unhealthy" material. Whatever that is.

This is the actual ad for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, opening in just a few days.

I think they're kind of cute together.

Had this occurred under Clinton, all hell would have broken loose.

As the government prepared for war in Iraq in the fall of 2002, a senior political appointee in the Defense Department chose oil services giant Halliburton Co. to secretly plan how to repair Iraqi oil fields, and then briefed Vice President Cheney's chief of staff and other White House officials about the sole-source contract before it was granted. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said the new details about the $1.8 million contract, disclosed last week in a Pentagon briefing for congressional staff members, raise new questions about whether the vice president or his office played any role in decisions to give what became billions of dollars worth of government business to Halliburton, where Cheney was chief executive from 1995 to 2000.

Cheney has said neither he nor his office influenced decisions to give contracts to Halliburton.

In a letter to Cheney yesterday, Waxman said the circumstances "appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts."

"They also seem to contradict the Administration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of contracts to Halliburton," wrote Waxman, senior Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee and one of the sharpest critics of the government's ties to Halliburton.

Kevin Kellems, a spokesman for Cheney, played down the importance of Waxman's letter, suggesting it was politically motivated. "We stand by our previous statements," Kellems said.

No outrage? No special prosecutor? No calls for our secretive VP to step down from his ivory tower and give us a more complete explanation? No, of course not; we're at war. He can do as he chooses.

So asks Republican pundit and former Bush attack dog Andrew Sullivan, as he contemplates new evidence that Rumsfeld knew about plans to use attack dogs as a torture device (call it what you will -- torture is torture) at Guantanamo. They were never used there, but they were at Abu Ghraib.

Impeachment hearings, anyone?

The article Sullivan points to proves what most of us have known all along: Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez is a liar, and he's probably toast.

But wait, that's not all. Today Mark Kleiman points to an article in a conservative British paper indicating the investigations will become a whole lot worse over the next few days. Documents are about to come out that show the abuse was approved at "the very highest levels." Bad apples indeed. Heh.

Xinhua needs some help with translating headlines into English:

Families of Chinese workers killed in Afghanistan get aids

What a difference an "s" makes.

Many were appointed by Reagan and Bush Senior. Does this tell us something? This is extremely unusual.

A group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and should be defeated in November.

The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, will explicitly condemn Bush's foreign policy, according to several of those who signed the document.

"It is clear that the statement calls for the defeat of the administration," said William C. Harrop, the ambassador to Israel under President Bush's father and one of the group's principal organizers.

Those signing the document, which will be released in Washington on Wednesday, include 20 former U.S. ambassadors, appointed by presidents of both parties, to countries including Israel, the former Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia.

Others are senior State Department officials from the Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations and former military leaders, including retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East under President Bush's father. Hoar is a prominent critic of the war in Iraq.

Some of those signing the document — such as Hoar and former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill A. McPeak — have identified themselves as supporters of Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. But most have not endorsed any candidate, members of the group said.

It is unusual for so many former high-level military officials and career diplomats to issue such an overtly political message during a presidential campaign.

This is simply unprecedented. These are not whiny liberals or people pushing a book or getting revenge. This represents the epitome of the concerned citizen. It is part of a groundswell of dissatisfaction among the military and among national security experts -- even those who, in normal times, would almost certainly side with the Republicans.

It's definitely the most interesting time I've ever seen in America's political history. It's also definitely time for a big change.

My good friend Joseph Bosco over at Longbow Papers is having serious problems with his blogging technology, and at the moment he is unable to post at all. He can't say exactly when he'll be able to post again, but hopefully it'll be very soon. Joseph is one of China's most prolific bloggers, so I know the misery he must be going through, held hostage by technology. Hurry back, Joseph.

As one commenter writes, this blog in general and this post in particular could be an Onion parody of blogging. There are nearly 60 comments (at the moment) to the Polling post, each more hilarious and vicious than the last.

Poor lady; but she definitely brought it upon herself. Her post on Iraqi oil is another strong contender for a bimbo award.

Links via Pandagon. There's also a rather biting observation about the Polling post over at Sadly, No:

There's dumb (D.) There's fucktard dumb (FD.) And then there's clueless fucktard dumb (CFD.) That was somewhere below CFD.

Update: She has closed her comments, and frankly I don't blame her. She got flamed alive. (At least her site traffic soared from its average of about 200 hits a day to about 2500.) Some of the comments to Sadly No's post are worth reading -- especially the ones suggesting we try to deal with her kindly.

Accocrding to this gossipy article, a lot of observers believe Jiang is unhappy with Hu Jintao's performance, and wants to see Zeng replace him. It's worth a glance, if only to see how the old players interact with one another, and to be reminded of just how much clout the lizardy Jiang still wields (not that this was ever in doubt).

Sully almost never comments on China, so it was good to see him speak out against the Chinese government for its forcible "psychiatric tratment" of AIDS campaigner Hu Jia (scroll down to find the entry).

Sullivan cites a story from Human Rights Watch that correctly refers to this treatment as a form of torture.

Yes, a form of torture. But how can the U.S. now take a stand against this, when the president has memos drawn up explaining why torture is sometimes okay?

Did we ever think we'd see the day Sullivan would condemn Bush like this? Amazing.

Here's what Human Rights Watch had to say about the treatment of Hu Jia.

When a fellow activist attempted to deliver some AIDS materials to Hu Jia on the evening of June 1, police refused to allow them to meet, and gave Hu Jia a brutal thrashing that resulted in injuries to his head and left arm. On June 3, four police officers forced their way into Hu Jia's home and said they would be staying there to monitor his activities. When Hu Jia objected, they struck him in the presence of his father and mother, then took him away and detained him in a cold, damp basement for three days and three nights. Since releasing Hu Jia on June 6, police have continued their surveillance on his home, cutting off all of the family's telephone access and refusing to allow Hu Jia to leave the house.

The more recent order for psychiatric evaluation is causing considerable distress to Hu Jia and his parents. Hu Jia's parents see absolutely no sign of mental abnormality in Hu Jia, and are well aware that "psychiatric treatment" has been forced upon a number of dissidents and religious practitioners, sometimes resulting in them actually becoming mentally unstable. A source passed HRIC a message from Hu Jia's family and friends calling on the international community to take note of Hu Jia's desperate situation. The message states, "If the police forcibly commit Hu Jia to a mental hospital against the wishes of himself and his family, this constitutes using psychiatric treatment as a form of torture and political persecution."

Anyone care to defend the government's actions? Anyone care to tell Hu Jia to relax, because things are getting better, and reform is in the air?

Related post: The Indescribable Tragedy of AIDS in China

This will certainly add some fuel to the controversy.

A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (news - web sites) said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers to break his father's resistance to interrogators.

The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said.

Whatever it takes. The new American Way, and the perfect formula for winning hearts and minds.

Update: Contemplating the approval by higher-ups of using attack dogs to terrify prisoners, Andrew Sullivan today comes to similar conclusions on our winning formula.

It seems to me to be getting clearer and clearer that Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few rogue soldiers. The dogs are among the least troubling tactics, of course. But when you also consider that up to 80 percent of the inmates at Abu Ghraib were guilty of nothing, you have to wonder who thought this was a good way to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis.

Stay tuned:

The Securities and Exchange Commission is formally investigating allegations that a Halliburton Co. subsidiary was involved in paying $180 million in bribes to get a natural gas project contract in Nigeria. Vice President Dick Cheney was head of the oil services conglomerate at the time.

Cheney was heading the company for five of the seven years in which the bribes were allegedly paid. This is in addition to the probe into alleged overcharges in Iraq by Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

It's going to be a very busy summer, what with the election and so many investigations under way.

Stolen, headline and all, from Wonkette, who helpfully informs us that the fellow above "is a Sioux, not a Village People."

China is actually admitting just how abysmal its police force's track record is. I guess this openness is a good thing, but it's hard not to be depressed by the numbers.

China's law enforcers managed to solve only about 30 per cent of all reported cases last year, a ranking official said in a rare admission of the inadequacy of the country's police.

This is just one concern in a litany of shortcomings listed on Thursday by Mr Zhang Xinfeng, Assistant Minister of Public Security, Xinhua news agency reported.

'It should be soberly noted that a gap exists between the expectations of the Communist Party, the nation and the people and the actual ability of the police to solve cases and enforce the law,' he said.

The efficiency of the police force had emerged as a public issue in China, as a loosening of social controls made crime easier, while media scrutiny had forced officers to become at least a bit more accountable.

Zhang also admitted the police frequently treat suspects brutally, hold them too long in prison, and are often in partnership with criminals.

You don't say.

When I first got back to America I wrote about a book called What Should I do with My Life by Po Bronson. I never made it through the first half, as I found it got redundant and slow. But that doesn't mean I didn't benefit from it.

The key point, which I should have know without having to read about it, is that often the answer to the big question is right in front of our faces, but we don't see it. Or rather, we refuse to allow ourselves to see it. We come up with a million reasons why we can't do it -- it's not practical, we're too old, we don't have the experience, the capital, the time, the whatever. I was going through this angst because I had to face the painful fact that I wasn't happy anymore being a PR executive. I enjoy the creative side of the business -- the writing and the media relations part. I hate the account part, the billing and the counting of hours and preparing monthly reports jammed full of BS to justify our jacked-up invoices....

What the book said to me was, Look at what you do that you love and that you're good at. That was pretty simple: I love to write, and it's been the mainstay of all the work I've done from the day I got out of college. Why didn't it hit me earlier? Why did I feel I "had" to work for a company as an account manager, doing work that's topheavy in administration and spreadsheets -- the things that give me nightmares?

After reading several chapters, it just seemed so obvious, like "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" Only for years it was never obvious, because I just took it as a truth that I had to be a corporate man.

So I did something radical. I called four of my old friends from the local PR business, all of whom worked for me when I was with a dot-com back in the late 90s and who are now managing their own businesses. I met with them all and told them I was thinking of becoming a freelance writer, and asked if they had suggestions. Not only did they give me suggestions, but they all gave me work to do.

And the sky cleared even more. In just two weeks -- about three days of work, spread out over 14 days -- I wrote three press releases, edited a white paper, wrote a short article and a corporate brochure. And I earned a few thousand dollars. It was not an impossibility. It was not a pipedream. I can really do this. If I really go at it, creating a web site and marketing myself and networking, it could actually become a fulltime career. Is it possible? Can our career really be the thing we love?

"Follow your bliss," Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers in the great PBS series, The Power of Myth. I thought it was too late for that, that I had boxed myself into a corner where it was PR Exec or nothing. I can't really describe the sense of hope I felt upon realizing there are other possibilities, after "knowing" that there weren't.

I was lucky the past few weeks. The work just came to me. It probably won't be like that every week. But it was certainly a revelation, and it raised my hopes higher than they'd been in a long time. I can't say that this is my true bliss, writing about storage networks and semiconductors. But it's writing, and a lot of it (the brochure especically) was true creative writing. It's a huge step in the right direction.

So even though I can't say I adored Po Bronson's book, I can say it made a differrence for me. So it was well worth the money I paid, and then some. I've been told by my friends that more writing projects are on the way. Strange how, just as Bronson says, once you look for these opportunities, the ones lurking right in front of your face (often invisibly), your life can take on a new meaning, and the answer to the question What should I do with my life? just sort of comes to you.

For three months, Cheng Yizhong, editor of Guangzhou's crusading Southern Metropolitan Daily, has languished in prison, still not knowing what he will be charged with or when he'll be in court. This article offers a good overview of the supression of the tabloid, and its ramifications for other Chinese media.

Staff [of Southern Daily] believe the problems go back to the newspaper's exposure early last year of the death of Sun Zhigang, a young graphic artist arrested for not having a city resident's permit, and then beaten to death by other prisoners in a police lockup at the instigation of his guards.

As the Southern Metropolitan Daily broke the scandal, Mr Cheng was contacted by a friend of the Guangzhou Communist Party's political and legal committee chief, Jiang Guifang.

The editor was asked not to mention that Mr Jiang, in a speech only months earlier, had backed strong efforts by city police to round up migrant workers lacking stay permits.

Mr Cheng robustly refused, and the paper did mention the speech in a report last June.

Mr Jiang, the party's legal chief, was then forced to make a humiliating "self-criticism" at an internal party meeting.

I find that scary as hell. Arrest and lengthy prison sentences (others at the paper have been sentenced to 11 and 12 years) for making a local party chief feel embarrassed. And, as the article says, it can only put pressure on other newspapers throughout China to limit or halt their criticism of party officials.

Media reform? I hear about it all the time. And I know there are pockets of true media reform in China, mainly in vertical publications with a very small readership. As for the mainstream media, they may be getting more avant garde, but they all know there is a danger zone, and if they venture into it their lives can be destroyed at the whim of a local official. Scary as hell.

Du Daobin, who threatened China's stability by posting some essays on the Internet that questioned the wisdom of one-party rule, has been given a light sentence of three years in jail, suspended for four years. I think that means he's going to be under house arrest.

Others found guilty of similar crimes have been far less lucky, some going to prison for as long as 11 years.

This was fairly predictable, since Du had become an international cause celebre. Five months ago I wrote, "Despite police reluctance, Liu Di was finally released, and the smart money will be on Du's release as well. There is simply too much international attention on the case, and the government now has little choice."

But to prevent the sprouting up of new mini-Du's, China has announced the creation of a "vigilante web site" Chinese surfers can use to report pornography sites and, one would assume, cyberdissidents who threaten to destroy China's stability with their lethal essays and doodlings.

The authorities behind the new website claimed at its launch that it would protect the common interest of Chinese web surfers and guide the healthy development of the internet.

On the site's homepage is a space where examples of web abuse can be reported.

Officials said the privacy of those who reported offending web sites would be protected, while their operators would be warned to remove the material.

The officials stressed that the main aim of the site was to protect young people from harmful material, pornography in particular.

The problem is, "harmful" is in the eye of the beholder. We all know that the CCP sees harm in a lot of stuff that a sane and secure government would see as harmless. (Remember, they shut down Vagina Monologues and insist on policing Britney's wardrobe.)

In any event, as the article points out, this is just another step on China's part to strengthen government control of the Internet, an effort that I supect (and hope) is doomed to failure.

Update: Much more on Du Daobin over at Reporters without Borders.

Over at CNN, human rights attorney and columnist Joanne Mariner offers a sober wrap-up article on last week's anniversary. Of greatest interest to me were its summaries of interviews with four of the student leaders. Especially this one:

Zhou Fengsou, a physics major at the time of the massacre, was never prosecuted for his role at Tiananmen Square. But after years of monitoring and police harassment, he finally left China for the United States.

He told Human Rights Watch that the protests at Tiananmen Square were "the biggest event" for his generation. "I feel lucky to have been a part. It was the one time I experienced the beautiful character of the Chinese people longing for a democratic China where we could freely speak our minds. We believed we could get there. Later I experienced the worst of human nature. People died."

She closes on an idealistic note, and someone had better caution her not to hold her breath.

The horror of the killings at Tiananmen Square resonates both inside and outside of China. While memories of these events cannot be excised, they can be properly addressed.

Not only should the Chinese authorities publicly acknowledge responsibility for the killings, they should punish the perpetrators, compensate the families of the victims, and allow those who fled the country afterwards to return home.

Pigs should fly. John Ashcroft should tell the truth. Alas, not in this lifetime.

Other posts about Tiananmen Square:
Tiananmen Square revisited
Tiananmen Square re-revisited
The story behind the Tiananmen Square "tank man" photo

I wrote earlier about my phone number in China, which included the numbers 14114 ("I want to die -- I want, I want to die!").

Well, yesterday I was handed my new license plates. All the plates in Arizona start with three numbers followed by three letters. So of all the combinations of three numbers there are in the world, which combination is mine?

911.

Update: For more on Yanyong's arrest, see this post.

If true, this sounds totally despicable:

Chinese police have ordered the family of 30-year-old Hu Jia, the AIDS campaigner, to place him in a psychiatric institution for evaluation and treatment or said that they would forcibly do so, said Human Rights in China, which is based in New York and Hong Kong.

"Hu Jia is facing the prospect of China's dreaded 'judicial psychiatry,' a means of persecuting dissidents and removing them from public circulation, sometimes permanently," the group said.

"This constitutes using psychiatric treatment as a form of torture and political persecution."

Hu's parents saw no sign of mental abnormality in him and were aware that psychiatric treatment had been forced upon a number of dissidents and religious practitioners, sometimes resulting in them becoming mentally unstable, it said.

The same article says that Human Rights Watch is demanding that China free Dr. Jiang Yanyong, the famous SARS whistleblower who was arrested along with his wife last week and held incommunicado ever since.

"Chinese authorities should immediately release Dr. Jiang Yanyong," the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement. Jiang was detained along with his wife, Hua Zhongwei, while en route to the U.S. Embassy on June 1 to get a visa, it said.

In February, Jiang wrote a letter to China's Parliament, the National People's Congress, and other leaders giving details of what he witnessed in 1989 when the army shot its way into the center of Beijing to clear protesters off Tiananmen Square.

"China wants to project an image of progress and rule of law, but Dr. Jiang's arbitrary detention shows that this government is not bound by constraints - save protecting itself," said Sam Zarifi, deputy head of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch.

Zarifi's point is well taken, and it's a shame. It's even a deeper shame that in recent weeks America's government has shown that under Bush, sometimes we're not much better, at least in terms of our government's ruthlessness in quashing criticism.

It's really too bad, because it makes it very hard for the US to point fingers at human rights violators without having the charge thrown back in its face, with evidence provided by the Bush administration.

It appears only one of the many conservative pundits out there is stepping up to the plate and condemning the incredible beating of a US soldier by other US soldiers, as well as John Ashcroft's refusal to give Congress the Justice Department's famous memo on torture.

Andrew Sullivan lashes out at Bush and Ashcroft today, obviously outraged at their willingness to evade and deceive. If you haven't read of the beating of Sean Baker, see Sullivan's account. In fact, even if you have read about it, go read Sullivan. Tell me if it doesn't make your blood boil. I hate to say this and I know it sounds simplistic, but it really does seem that we can never believe what our government and military tell us. How can one read the post and think otherwise?

Where are the other conservatives? How come all they can talk about is Ronad Reagan? There are crimes being committed that should have true conservatives apoplectic with rage.

This sounds beyond belief. Absolutely horrifying.

Billmon is the smartest liberal blogger, right alongside Josh Marshall, and by far the best writer. I just read his brilliant post about John Ashcroft's testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I asked myself, Are the American people aware of what's going on here? Do they have any idea just how unaccountable the present administration is, how anything they decide to do can be justified under the mantra "We're at war"?

I kept getting angrier and angrier as I read it. It was at this point that I finally stopped reading and called Kerry's office in Arizona to volunteer:

The very worst bit, though, the one that really drove home the potential consequences of our brave new legal world, was Ashcroft's response to Russ Feingold's question about the Brandon Mayfield case. Mayfield, you may recall, is the Oregon attorney who was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of involvement in the Madrid bombing - only to be (grudgingly) released when the Spanish police rejected the bureau's fingerprint match.

To be sure, Ashcroft apologized profusely for the error. But Feingold's question went right to the heart of why apologies are not an adequate substitute for due process:

FEINGOLD: "But for the fact that he had access to counsel and judicial review, Mr. Mayfield might still be in jail today. Held as an enemy combatant, Mr. Mayfield would be in a military jail without the right to an attorney. And his truthful statements of innocence would be taken simply as failure of his interrogators."

The AG's answer, roughly:

ASHCROFT: (crickets chirping)

He didn't even bother to respond to the point. How could he?

In the end, the AG's arguments really all came down to a single point - that is, unless "we're in power and you're not" is also a point. America is at war, he repeatedly intoned, to a chorus of GOP amens. And in war time what the president says goes - at least as far as the legislative branch is concerned.

We've simply never seen anything like it. And it's tolerated. We should all be shouting with rage. Ashcroft even reserves for himself the right to classify documents retroactively -- after they have been made public, if it is in "the nation's interest," which always means if it will help prevent embarrassing the government. Read Billmon's post; it's all there. Just be prepared to feel very angry.

Ashcroft prays; it won't do him any good

UPDATE: I just came across Patrick Leahy's remarks to Ashcroft at today's hearing, and am citing the entire thing here for the record. How refreshing, to see Ashcroft exposed as the miserable failure he is. Magnificent.

Mr. Attorney General, welcome. It's been, I believe, about 15 months to pass since your last very brief appearance in March last year. Your testimony here comes today about 1,000 days after the September 11th attacks, and the subsequent launch of your efforts against terrorism.

As National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged in her testimony before the 9/11 commission, the terrorist threat to our nation did not begin in September 2001. But the preliminary findings of the 9/11 commission suggest that counterterrorism simply was not a priority of your Justice Department prior to September 11th.

Problems ranged in your department from an understaffed foreign translation program, woefully inadequate information systems, cultural attitudes that frustrated information sharing across agencies. Just one day before the attacks, on September 10th, you rejected the FBIs request to include more money for counterterrorism in your budget proposal.

And while you have recently been critical of the so-called wall between criminal investigators and intelligence agencies, you did nothing to lower it during your first seven full months in office.

In fact, you put up exactly the same wall in your administration.

The president is fond of saying that September 11th changed everything, as if to wipe out all missteps and misplaced priorities of the first year of this administration. After the attacks, you promised a stunned nation that its government would expend every effort and devote all necessary resources to bring the people responsible for these crimes to justice. Certainly the American people would expect no less.

So a thousand days later and it is time to ask for the fulfillment of the promise you made.

Mr. Attorney General, your statement lists accomplishments of the Department of Justice since 9/11, but you leave out a number of things.

For example, of course the obvious, Osama bin Laden remains at large.

At least three senior Al Qaida operatives who helped plan the 9/11 attacks are in U.S. custody, but there has been no attempt to bring them to justice.

The Moussaoui prosecution has bogged down before any trial.

A German court acquitted two 9/11 co-conspirators, in part because the U.S. government and Justice Department and others refused to provide evidence to them.

Three defendants who you said had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks did not have such knowledge. The department retracted your statement and then you had to apologize to the court because you violated a gag order in the case.

The man you claimed was about to explode a dirty bomb in the U.S. had no such intention or capability, and because he's been held for two years without access to counsel, any crimes he did commit might never be prosecuted.

Terrorist attacks on Capitol Hill and elsewhere involving the deadly bioterror agent anthrax have yet to be solved, and the department is defending itself in a civil rights action brought by a man who you probably identified as a person of interest in the anthrax investigation.

U.S. citizens with no connection to terrorism have been in prison as material witnesses for chunks of time, and then, "Oops, I'm sorry," when what the Justice Department announced was a 100 percent positive fingerprint match turned out to be 100 percent wrong.

Non-citizens with no connection to terrorism have been rounded up seemingly on the basis of their religion or ethnicity, held for months without charges, and in some cases physically abused.

Interrogation techniques approved by the Department of Justice have led to abuses that have tarnished our nation's reputation and driven hundreds, if not thousands, of new recruits to our enemies to terrorism.

Your department turned a Canadian citizen over to Syria to be tortured. And then your department deported another individual to Syria over the objection of experienced prosecutors and agents who thought he was a terrorist and wanted to prosecute him.

And one of the most amazing things, your department, under your direction, has worked to deny compensation to American victims of terrorism, including former POWs tortured by Saddam Hussein's regime. You have tried to stop former POWs tortured by Saddam Hussein -- Americans -- you tried to stop them from getting compensation.

And documents have been classified, unclassified, reclassified, to score political points rather than for legitimate national security reasons.

Statistics have been manipulated to exaggerate the department's success in fighting terrorism. The threat of another attack on U.S. soil remains high, although how high depends primarily on who within the administration is talking.

Mr. Attorney General, you spent much of the past two years increasing secrecy, lessening accountability and touting the government's intelligence-gathering powers.

The threshold issue, of course, is -- and I believe you would agree with me on this -- what good is having intelligence if we can't use it intelligently. Identifying suspected terrorist is only a first step. To be safer we have to follow through.

Instead of declining tough prosecutions, we need to bring the people who are seeking to harm us to justice. That's how our system works. Instead, your practices seem to be built on secret detentions and overblown press releases.

Our country is made no safer through the self-congratulatory press conferences when we're facing serious security threats.

The government agency that bears the name of justice has yet to deliver the justice for the victims of the worst mass murder in this nation's history.

The 9/11 commission is working hard to answer important questions about the attacks and how the vulnerabilities in our system that allowed them to occur, but it can't mete out justice to those involved. Neither the 9/11 commission nor this committee can do the work of your Department of Justice.

Mr. Attorney General, since September 11th, you blamed former administration officials for intelligence failures that happened on your watch. You've used a tar brush to attack the patriotism of the Americans who dared to express legitimate concerns about constitutional freedoms. You refused to acknowledge serious problems, even after the Justice Department's own inspector general exposed widespread violations of the civil liberties of immigrants caught up in your post-September 11th dragnets.

Secretary Rumsfeld recently went before the Armed Services Committee to say that he, he Secretary Rumsfeld, should be held responsible for the abuses of Iraqi prisoners on his watch.

Director Tenet is resigning from the Central Intelligence Agency. Richard Clark went before the 9/11 commission and began with his admission of the failure that this administration bears for the tragedy that consumed us on 9/11.

And I'm reminded this week, as we mourn the passing of President Reagan, that one of the acts for which he will be remembered is that he conceded, that while his heart told him that the weapons for hostages and unlawful funding of insurgent forces in Nicaragua should not have been acts of his administration, his head convinced him that they were, and he took personal responsibility.

We need checks and balances. As much as gone wrong that you stubbornly refuse to admit. For this democratic republic to work, we need openness and accountability.

Now, Mr. Attorney General, your style is often to come to attack. You came before this committee shortly after 9/11 to question our patriotism when we sought to conduct a congressional oversight and ask questions.

You went before the 9/11 commission to attack a commissioner by brandishing a conveniently declassified memo and so unfairly slanted a presentation that President Bush himself disavowed your actions.

So I challenge you today to abandon any such plans for the session. Begin it instead by doing that which you have yet to do: talk plainly with us and with the American people, about not only what's going right in the war on terrorism -- and there are those things that are going right -- but also about the growing list of things that are going wrong, so we can work together to fix them.

Let's get about the business of working together to do our job, a better job of protecting the American people and making sure that the wrongdoers are brought to justice, are brought to trial and are given the justice that this country can mete out.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Definitely time for regime change.

You think I'm kidding? It's all in this very strange article:

Security experts in Taiwan have dismissed a US Pentagon report which suggested the island bomb China's Three Gorges Dam to deter a possible invasion by its political rival.

While the government did not respond to the report, Taiwan's Deputy Defence Minister Tsai Ming-shian on Wednesday urged parliament to approve a budget to boost its military might, saying it is likely Taiwan will be attacked in the next two to four years.

In a recent report, the US Defense Department warned that China was developing military tools to prevent Taiwan from achieving independence, including preventing the United States from going to the island's aid should a war break out.

The report went so far as to suggest that since Taipei cannot match Beijing's ability in field offensive systems, it could instead attack China's urban population or high-value targets, such as the Three Gorges Dam, to deter a military coercion.

But security analysts in Taiwan said such a scenario is unlikely to happen, as the risk is too high and the damage too limited.

Back to the drawing board.

I had no idea Taiwan was seriously thinking of attacking China anytime soon. According to the article, Taiwan intelligence indicates "China may launch small-scale attacks against Taiwan in 2006 or 2008." You'd think at that point China would have its hands full dealing with the Olympics.

By a bizarre accident, I stumbled onto a Singapore professor's bio and I'm a bit blown away. It has to be a joke -- or is it? If it is, it looks like an amazingly elaborate hoax. If it's not, I have the deepest sympathy for the poor professor who has to go through life with that name. (I've heard a lot of Chinese names, and "Shit" isn't one of them.) Would someone go to all this trouble for a laugh? Very bizarre.

This is sweet: "The poll finds Kerry leading Bush in the presidential contest by 49% to 44% among registered voters, and 50% to 44% among likely voters."

The nasty part is yet to come, and Bush/Rove will be pulling all the stops to smear Kerry and anyone who stands up for him. They are doing one hell of a job on George Soros already. But I think the people are looking for more substance this year and less BS. Bush's record speaks for itself. If the only kind of ads he can run are attack ads, and none that speak to his achievements, the conclusion is inevitable: he hasn't achieved anything.

These figures for a sitting president are abysmal, and there's no way the Bushies aren't panicking. With the Valerie Plame case on the horizon, the 911 commission's report set to come out, Michael Moore's movie hitting the theaters on June 25 and, of course, the Abu Ghraib story barely even getting started yet, Bush will have a lot to deal with.

[Note about Fahrenheil 9/11: I take Michael Moore with a big grain of salt, but I do believe the film is poised to do considerable damage. For the polarized voters it won't have much if any effect. But it's sure to be a big hit among college students, and from what I've seen in the trailer, it's a damned powerful movie and I won't be surprised to see it boost student voter registration. It certainly won't help Bush in any way.]

This has been out for a week or so but I just came across it, and haven't laughed so hard in days. You've got to hear it. It brings back all sorts of old Monty Python memories, while reminding us of just what an asshole John Ashcroft is (not that any of us would forget). If you're at work, use headphones.

Brilliant.

America has been reduced to a giant gush-a-thon as everyone who ever knew Ronald Reagan is wheeled out to recall some nostalgic anecdote about the great prevaricator. The footage seems endless. Yesterday Fox News viewers were treated with a helicopter view of the hearse driving up to the Reagan mansion to pick up the corpse as though it were stunning breaking news, like the OJ Bronco ride. Hugh Sidey and George Will and Mike Wallace and Walter Cronkite are pulled out of the closet, the mothballs dusted off, as they recall one tedious story after another that no one wants to hear about. At times, the "coverage" is so stultifyingly dull that even the little flies on the wall tuck in their wings and go to sleep.

Reagan was likeable. He had a folksy charm -- but he was first and foremost an actor. What lay beneath was far less delightful. His powers of oratory were real. I still tremble a bit when I hear him say, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" It was one of the great moments in 20th Century oratory. But that aside, there is little else I can say I admired or will miss. (See Joseph Bosco's post about this topic.)

Now, in an article on Reagan that is as biting and savage as it is funny, the great and powerful Christopher Hitchens goes for the jugular and takes no prisoners. This is one of his kinder paragraphs:

He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

Nostalgia and the passing years play tricks on the memory, and many of us have idealized Reagan into something he most certainly was not. Grillparzer put it well when he wrote that "Death is like a bolt of lightning, transfiguring that which it consumes." Ronald Reagan, who stutterred like an idiot when confronted with the outrageously illegal and vile Iran-contra plan, has indeed been transfigured, and the media will play up the grief and sorrow to the hilt. It's going to be a weepy week here in America. Too bad, that so much of this grief is either manufactured or based on a fallacy.

Dai Tou Laam Diary has added yet another lengthy excerpt from William Hinton's book and given us a biography of the man, describing his close ties and lengthy relationship with China and its leaders. And he gives us more of Hinton's eyewitness descriptions of the Tiananmen Square massacre which I would put in the must-read category.

If the "Nightline" program I saw was typical of the television coverage, that showed personnel carriers on fire arriving in the square and being attacked by people, which gives a completely wrong impression of the sequence of events. It looked as though the people were on the offensive and the army was on the defensive. Actually, by the time these vehicles got to the square, they had shot their way through barricade after barricade and had killed probably close to 2,000 people. Arriving in the square was the end of the assault, not the beginning of it. Once the army began to shoot down people they got very angry and became active and counterattacked in any way they could. The Chinese television programs followed the same pattern; they showed the end first. They took scenes from Sunday afternoon where the people were burning tanks and weapons carriers and put them at the beginning. They said, "This is Saturday afternoon and this is the way people treated our poor soldiers. So our soldiers had no choice but to hit back." Actually they reversed the days, and made out that the soldiers were the victims of the people, which was a complete lie. The army came in shooting and they killed people all the way down the avenue. And they kept killing people even after they secured the square.

That's just a sample; be sure to read the entire post.

According to a detailed article in The Guardian (brought to my attention by a reader via email - thanks!), Yunnan province is taking extraordinary strides in educating its populace about AIDS prevention. Thanks to its position alongside the "Golden Triangle," its high poverty rate and high rates of prostitution and illegal drugs, Yunnan has long been seen as a primary breeding ground for AIDS.

At the end of last year, local officials reported 15,000 confirmed cases of the disease in the province. Because so many of those likely to have been affected live in remote mountain communities where there is little opportunity for testing, it is estimated that the actual figure is probably above 80,000 and rising at the rate of about 30% per year.

That is the bad news. The good news is that Yunnan has done more than any other province to face up to the problem rather than pretending it does not exist, which is still the approach favoured by many local governments. Yunnan has given the media greater freedom to report on the issue, welcomed support from international organisations and shown a willingness to experiment with radical pilot projects, elements of which have since been adopted nationwide.

Earlier this year, Yunnan became the first province in China to enact a local ordinance on HIV prevention. It is the first place where free condoms are provided in hotel rooms, where methadone and needle-exchange programs are offered to drug users trying to kick the habit, and where local officials are attempting outreach programs to socially ostracised groups such as sex workers and homosexuals.

Arguably more radical has been a program to re-educate the police, who are more used to fighting gun battles with drug dealers and throwing users into detention centres. Since 2002, the training program at the Yunnan police academy has included a course on HIV-Aids prevention partly funded by a grant of 380,000 RMB (£25,000) from the UK.

The Chinese police -- being trained with funding from a UK AIDS prevention program? Now, that is amazing.

If you follow this topic, you have to read the article. It's another very positive sign that China is taking meaningful steps to deal with what could become one of the worst catastrophes in its history.

The country still isn't taking enough such steps on its own volition. Outside forces, be they foreign funding groups, Dr. David Ho or Bill Clinton, are constantly having to force China's arm. But looking at Yunnan, there's cause for some genuine optimism.

Related article: The indescribable tragedy of AIDS in China

I'm not sure yet whether this is a good or bad thing. Apparently Guandong has agreed to designate special detention centers for convicts with AIDS.

According to the Southern Metropolitan News, this is necessitated by the fast-growing number of AIDS-afflicted prisoners -- and the fact that their illness allows them to threaten other prisoners.

The move comes after several years of steady growth in the proportion of inmates suffering from Aids, the paper reported.

It quoted a lawmaker as saying Aids sufferers among the province's prison population are "fearless" and carry "a trump card" in the form of their disease.

The lawmaker did not elaborate on the remarks, but he appeared to accuse Aids victims of intimidating fellow inmates by threatening to infect them.

All I'll say for now is that it sounds very strange.

I hope everyone interested in the Tiananmen Square Massacre will visit Daai Tou Lam's excellent site to read his post on an eyewitness account of one William Hinton, author of The Great Reversal: The Privitization of China - 1978-1989. There is a lot to learn here, especially in the wake of revisionist efforts to downplay the horrors of June 3-4. People were mown down. Innocents perished.

Whether these murders took place in the square or on the surrounding streets is irrelevant. There was indeed a massacre. And that's no myth.

France's first gay wedding.

Armageddon lurks right around the corner. If you are married yourself, prepare for catastrophe as the sacred institution of marriage is threatened. The Peking Duck recommends that Europeans remain indoors until further notice, and for God's sake watch the children. We're all at risk; no one is safe.

The BBC interviews one of the leaders of the protests, Zhang Boli, an eyewitness to the clearing of Tiananmen Square on June 4. A chilling account that takes you right there.

This is an excellent article on the mysterious "Tiananmen tank man" and the efforts to indentify and find him. It includes some intriguing comments from Jeff Widener, the photographer who captured on film the man's standoff in front of a row of tanks on June 5, 1989. If this topic interests you, you'll want to read it.

It seems mobile phones are allowing foreign cultural influences to seep into North Korea, so the government is recalling them.

North Korea's mobile service began in November 2002, with products from Motorola Corp. of the United States and Nokia Corp. of Finland on the market in Pyongyang, Yonhap news agency said.

North Koreans were seen using mobile phones last month when the two Koreas held minister-level rapprochment talks, it said.

Experts believe North Korea had introduced the mobile technology to make communications convenient but later realised the device caused floods of foreign culture into the reclusive country, Yonhap said.

So now their use is forbidden, and they've been recalled. Sometimes I think Kim and his coterie might be a wee bit paranoid. Just a bit.

The BBC is collecting people's thoughts and memories on the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Check it out.

UPDATE: You MUST read this extraordinary look back by Tiananmen Square protestor Wang Dan, who spent years in prison following the crackdown. Here's the entire thing; it was also in today's unlinkable Wall Street Journal.

TOMORROW is the 15th anniversary of the massacre of student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. During the six years I spent in prison after the massacre, much of it in solitary confinement, I had ample time to reflect on whether we - the leaders of China’s 1989 democracy movement - made a mistake in encouraging the protests that culminated in the tragic events of 4 June.

Again and again, I have asked myself if there was another path that could have avoided the bloodshed. And whether, by bringing students and other ordinary citizens on to the streets to confront the Communist leadership, we frustrated the plans of reformist leaders - such as the former Communist Party general secretary, Zhao Ziyang - to engineer a peaceful transition to a democratic China. It’s a question I’ve also often been asked during my public appearances in the US, since I was forced into exile in April 1998. Emphasis added by me.

Now, reflecting on the events of 15 years ago, it is clear to me as never before that the Tiananmen massacre was an unavoidable step in the long path to a free China, and that true political reform can never come from within the Communist Party.

Indeed, one of the real tragedies of 1989 was not that we jeopardised the efforts of so-called reformist leaders. Rather it is that they never had the vision or political will to lead China toward democracy.

The events of 4 June were a turning point for me and other members of what we call "The 1989 Generation". Encouraged by the brief relaxation in the political environment in Beijing in the months before the killings, which had even made it possible for me to hold workshops on democracy, we harboured false hopes that change could come from within the Communist Party. It was this fantasy that emboldened us to take to the streets, calling on the government to fight corruption and take steps toward a free society. We petitioned the leadership in the hope of triggering a top-down reform.

Yet the response of "reformists" in the leadership was disappointing, to say the least. Had their hearts been with us, they would have surely seized this unique opportunity to support publicly our calls for democratisation.

Instead, they continued to hide behind closed doors. Only after he had already been outvoted in the Politburo standing committee did Mr Zhao finally come and visit us in Tiananmen Square. And when our modest demands were answered with gunshots on the night of 4 June, it shattered any remaining illusions.

The experience of the 15 years since then has confirmed what we failed to understand in 1989. Namely, that Communist leaders, be they conservatives or reformists, are all wedded to retaining the current political system, complete with its problems such as corruption and lack of accountability.

Look, for instance, at how even relatively enlightened officials such as Premier Wen Jiabao - who visited us in Tiananmen Square in 1989 - and President Hu Jintao have shied away from political reform since taking office. Instead, the issue remains a taboo subject in Beijing. And far from easing its iron grip on all forms of political dissent, the new leadership now seems intent on extending it to Hong Kong.

In the past, the Communist Party has reversed its official verdict on several other major political events in modern Chinese history. The Cultural Revolution, hailed by Mao Tse-tung as a great proletarian movement, has long since been repudiated. Another popular protest that also led to violent scenes in Tiananmen Square, the demonstration on 5 April, 1976, against the leftist leaders known as the "Gang of Four", was also initially suppressed and labelled as counter-revolutionary. Within two years, that verdict had been reversed and it was recognised as a legitimate public protest.

Yet when it comes to 4 June, there has been no change even after 15 years. That’s because Messrs Wen and Hu realise that re-evaluating the official description of the 1989 movement as counter-revolutionary would shake the foundations of the Communists’ grip on power.

But avoiding the issue will not make it go away. On the contrary, the cries for justice are getting ever louder.

In recent months, the group of parents and relatives of those killed in 1989, known as the Tiananmen Mothers, have been gaining increasing domestic and international support in their fight to reverse the official verdict on the 1989 movement. They have been joined by Jiang Yanyong, the heroic doctor who blew the lid on China’s initial cover-up of the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome last year. In an open letter to the Chinese leadership, Dr Jiang recounted what he witnessed on the night of the killings and called on the government to revisit what he called the worst Communist crimes since the Cultural Revolution.

The continued failure of the Chinese leadership to address the issue only increases the risk of further violent eruptions in the future, especially at a time of growing social discontent. With unemployed workers struggling to survive without any form of welfare benefits, residents forced from their homes without proper compensation and farmers living in extreme poverty as they shoulder unfair tax burdens, China is a tinder box which could be set on fire by the slightest spark.

Worse still, until the leadership confronts the past and re-evaluates the official verdict on the 1989 movement, there is always the danger that it could resort to such violent methods again to suppress any future protests.

One positive development is that, since the early 1990s, shoots of civil society have begun to sprout within China. As more Chinese enter the private sector, the state is no longer able to control every aspect of daily life in the way it used to.

On the contrary, people are starting to recognise the importance of monitoring the state and making government more accountable. And as the internet and modern telecommunications have become part of everyday life, it’s become easier to break through the government’s control of news and information and to organise campaigns for basic rights, be they the right to private property or freedom of speech. This provides a stronger basis for continuing the fight for democracy in China.

Fifteen years after the massacre, the 1989 democracy movement remains as much a part of my emotional present as my past. The movement and its aftermath have consumed the idealism and passion of my youth, and the fight for a reversal of the official verdict has become a goal which I can never abandon.

The 1989 student movement played an invaluable role in pointing out the path to democracy in China. Without it, we would still be clinging to the myth that a small group of enlightened Communist officials could rescue China from totalitarian rule. Instead, we have learned from our mistakes that year, and realised that China’s democratisation must be a bottom-up process, driven by forces outside the Communist system.

And when that happens, as it inevitably will, I will be able proudly to say that we, the 1989 Generation, were part of the process that brought freedom to my home country.

There's nothing I can add to that, except Thank You.

There's an interesting article in China Daily on the difficulties Chinese students have speaking up in class. I encountered a variety of this in the business world, and it's something I suspect expats in Asia all have to deal with at one time or another. ESL teachers probably deal with it every day.

Lu is teaching courses on automatic controls in the institute. Whenever raising a question, whether difficult or not, Lu finds there are almost no students volunteering answers.

"Waiting is meaningless and in vain. Instead,many times I have to call some students by name to answer my questions. I used the name list for the classes I am not familiar with," he said.

However, Lu is always upset about the answers given. Students apparently lack key points and reply irrelevant words due to little practice in answering questions, let alone actively raising questions or ideas. Usually, he has to answer his own questions or speak by adding details to what he has already said.

Not only Lu, but teachers in other universities, colleges and institutes are experiencing similar problems.

"I have talked with many of my colleagues and teachers in other universities," Lu said, "Most of them are worried about the same problem."

Some teachers say that most Chinese students apparently pay much more attention to reading and learning knowledge by heart than participating in the practice of oral expression.

I'm surprised to see China Daily writing about this as though it's a recent phenomenon. I've been hearing about it and experiencing it for years. When you have an educational system that for decades has taught students to learn by rote, and to listen to the teacher and memorize, what would they expect?

If the professors interviewed in the article are looking for fast answers, I'd recommend they forget about it. This trait isn't going away anytime soon, especially since memorization and cramming for tests is still the mainstay of Chinese education, as opposed to inquiry and problem solving and seeing things from many perspectives. That's why so many of the managers there are imported from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Memorization won't help you solve problems that require critical thinking.

I hear this is starting to change, very slowly. Problem solving is creeping into the curriculum. But remember, when you start teaching students to think for themselves, you're opening the door to all kinds of dangers. Authoritarian governments don't want their people asking too many questions. So expect any changes to be gradual in the extreme.

Remember Whitewater, and our eagerness to appoint a special prosecutor? It was all founded on nothing, but that's the way we do things in America; if there's reason to be suspicious, we investigate.

In the case of a memo from Cheney's office directing the army to choose Halliburton over other contractors in Iraq, it appears we have a smoking gun, certainly way more evidence than we had with Whitewater. And it appears Rumsfeld, too, was steering work to Halliburton, which could end up billing the government as much as $18 billion for its work in Iraq. (Damn, that's more than I've made in my entire life.)

So what are we waiting for? Investigate, for Christ's sake, and if there's enough there, impeach. The country is being raped, while the architects of war and their buddies are getting rich beyond all belief.

Whatever you do, be sure to see Kristoff's NY Times column today. He was an eyewitness to the June 4 madness at Tiananmen Square 15 years ago and, as always when he writes about this subject, you know it's from the heart.

Like most commentators on China, he acknowledges the new personal liberties while criticizing the continued strangulation of politcal freedoms. He notes the challenges the government faces and how at any time the right combination of factors can bring it down.

But then he makes a personal observation of that day in 1989 that stopped me for a moment. I could tell how strongly he felt as he wrote it, and I identified with every word. It's what I've been trying to articulate here for two years.

It's often said that an impoverished, poorly educated, agrarian country like China cannot sustain democracy. Yet my most powerful memory of that night 15 years ago is of the peasants who had come to Beijing to work as rickshaw drivers.

During each lull in the firing, we could see the injured, caught in a no-man's-land between us and the troops. We wanted to rescue them but didn't have the guts. While most of us in the crowd cowered and sought cover, it was those uneducated rickshaw drivers who pedaled out directly toward the troops to pick up the bodies of the dead and wounded.

Some of the rickshaw drivers were shot, but the rest saved many, many lives that night, rushing the wounded to hospitals as tears streamed down their cheeks. It would be churlish to point out that such people are ill-prepared for democracy, when they risked their lives for it.

We're forgetting that point, when we say the Chinese don't care so much for democracy as long as they can move up in the world. How can that be true if they were willing to die for it, even at a time of dramatic financial advancement? Aren't we selling them short? I know it's a very different time, but so many stories of individual heroism, all in the name of the same ideal, make their way into the papers every day.

Kristoff still believes they deserve democracy, that they crave it and can handle it. And so do I.

Shanghai is about to receive yet another American blogger, this one a student who expresses his concerns and aspirations as he prepares to take the plunge. Let's welcome him to the fold.

Wonderful news. Michael Moore can be over the top, but in general I find he's on-target. I'm hoping this will be popular with the college-age crowds and help incentivize them to vote. Now that Disney has given the film an indavertent PR boost that would make any director salivate, it's going to be a huge hit.

It has to be seen -- quite funny (and just a little bit creepy).

From the same source, another Bush joke, this one above average:

How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to replace a light bulb? Seven:

"1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be replaced,

"2. One to attack and question the patriotism of anyone who has questions about the light bulb,

"3. One to blame the previous administration for the need of a new light bulb,

"4. One to arrange the invasion of a country rumored to have a secret stockpile of light bulbs,

"5. One to get together with Vice President Cheney and figure out how to pay Halliburton Industries one million dollars for a light bulb,

"6. One to arrange a photo-op session showing Bush changing the light bulb while dressed in a flight suit and wrapped in an American flag,

"7. And finally one to explain to Bush the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country."

It's funny, and it's also not so funny.

Go read the best-written post ever on why "Microsoft, ladies and gentlemen, is a cheap whore," while "Apple is a lover." Here's a sample.

I was asked for advice today from someone who was apprehensive about buying a new Mac, and wanted to know my opinion. This, of course, is sort of like going up to Dick Cheney and saying “You know, I’m not sure about that Iraq thing. What do you think?”

She lives on the fringes of the law, but there’s no getting rid of her because she fulfils a certain need in our society. People want what she is selling.

There’s a certain painted-on mystique to her, of course. We’ve all been indoctrinated with the propaganda, the hooker with the heart of gold, the disturbingly wide-mouthed Pretty Woman. When you find her, though, beneath the paint she’s really quite plain. You take what you need from her, but reluctantly and because you have no alternative. You get what you want, but she is almost peripheral to the act.

Apple is a lover.

From the moment you meet her, you know that she wants you to be happy. She wants to be a part of your life, and you can’t help but be drawn into wanting to be a part of hers. She is beautiful and elegant in ways that the layers of paint on the Microsoft street-walker can only desperately try to imitate.

"Read the whole thing." A gem.

After returning to America in March, I upgraded my old terminal PC and was reminded of why so many jokes are always circulating the Internet about Bill Gates going to hell. It was like reliving the Book of Job, a case study in concentrated suffering, as things went wrong and hours and days were wasted.

I had a Mac years ago, and life was so much better. Now everyone says I have to have a PC, that there aren't enough programs available for the Mac anymore. After reading the above post, I think it's almost time for me to reconsider.

Britney Spears will be allowed to go on tour in China next year, but only if she agrees to "leave the revealing outfits at home."

Britney Spears' first China tour has been approved by the Culture Ministry, but they want to know what she's wearing before she hits the stage, the official China News Service reported Tuesday.

Spears, who is currently on a world tour to promote her latest album "In The Zone," will perform five concerts in Shanghai and Beijing sometime next year, CNS said.

....However, the star's sexy image has caused concern. Culture officials have asked the concert's Chinese organizers to guarantee she doesn't show too much skin on stage, CNS said.

"Relevant departments will carry out strict reviews of Britney Spears' performance clothing," the report said.

It wasn't clear what standards inspectors will use or how they would be enforced. A spokesman for Spears could not be immediately reached.

The head of the Culture Ministry's performance division, Pan Yan, said she hadn't received a performance application and couldn't comment on the report.

An unidentified spokesman for the concert's Chinese organizers was quoted by CNS as saying the ministry's wishes would be respected.

But he said Spears' outfits and stage show are the same on each stop of the tour and it would be "impossible to make up clothes specially for the China performances."

With more than 54 million records sold worldwide, Spears would be one of the biggest international pop stars to play here since the communist state's establishment in 1949.

Why anyone would want to go to a Britney Spears concert in the first place is beyond me. Knowing that there's no chance of any wardrobe malfunction is just one more incentive to stay home.