The real threat

China Military Marks 80th Anniversary:

"Much has yet to change, however. People's Liberation Army leaders took the opportunity of the anniversary to recommit to their role as the ruling Communist Party's house army, rejecting any notion of shifting loyalty to the government."

The complexity of China is neatly captured here. The government of the Peoples Republic of China may claim to be, in some senses, the successor to the governments that came before it - certainly so as the rightful government of every place that ever was under the control of some government of China. Yet the Peoples Liberation Army still sees itself as the servant of the Chinese Communist Party rather than the government. Thus, the role of the army is not. in the usual sense, the defense of the homeland, but the instrument by which the power of the party is extended.

Take Taiwan, for example. It was not a part of China when the Communist Party was formed, nor was it a part of China when the PLA was formed. It was part of Japan. It passed to the control of the government of the Republic of China as a result of the ROC's role as an ally of the US and Britain in WW2. That government continues to exist although its capital is at Taipei rather than Nanking. For those who haven't been paying attention, the ROC is the one with a vibrant, if sometimes unruly, multi-party democracy while the PRC is the one with a one-party dictatorship.

Defending Taiwan is not on the same order as the ill-advised attempt to create a democratic regime in Iraq. Kowtowing to the dictators in Beijing is both undignified and self-defeating. War with the PRC is not necessary unless the PRC forces the issue. Keeping the lid on its own people is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge for the Chinese Communist Party. That lid might have already been blown sky high if our own government had not been so anxious to please that regime, even at the risk of other vital national interests.

On The Road With John Edwards - not the cold reader, the other one

Ben Smith's Blog - Politico.com:

"Can JRE pull off a JFK, or an RFK (asks Politico chief political writer Mike Allen, who is sharing guestblogging duties while Ben is on vacation)? John Edwards plans to announce Monday that he’ll take a break from fund-raising and campaigning in early-voting states next week for a three-day, eight-state, 12-city “Road to One America” tour aimed at calling attention to poverty in the deep South, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and the Rust Belt."

The Breck Girl - according to that other Politico blog, not yours truly here at OldPolitico - is set to take his roadshow on a tour highlighting poverty in America.

For some reason, Mike Allen wants to see this as harking back to the political tactics of the brothers Kennedy, JFK in 1960 and RFK in 1968. For example:

"The photogenic swing is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s repeated coal-country campaigning before the West Virginia primary of 1960. His overwhelming victory ended Catholicism as an issue in the campaign and brought national attention to Appalachian poverty. Twenty-eight years later, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis donned a hard hat and overalls for an hour-long tour of a West Virginia coal mine."

I remember JFK campaigning in West Virginia, but I don't recall it being billed as rich boy slumming. If it had been, it is doubtful that he would have crushed Sen. Hubert Horatio Humphrey (D-MN)in the primary.

There were, and are still, a lot of proud, independent folks clinging to those hillsides and working the mines and hard-scrabble farms; some of them - the Pauleys of Charleston - cousins of my maternal grandmother. Great-grandfather Pauley was an organizer for the United Mine Workers back when that put a price on your head and forced your immediate family into hiding. Those people in West Virginia appreciated all the attention. I remember eating often in a restaurant in Charles Town which had little brass plates on some of the plain wooden chairs, each inscribed with the name of a politician who had stopped there and sat in that chair - JFK, HHH, and several lesser lights.

Being put on display as a living museum exhibit of poverty would have been deeply offensive. The psychological value of a big win in West Virginia for JFK was that the state was one of the whitest and most protestant and the most southern of the few states (15 plus DC) on the primary schedule at that time.

As for Dukakis in his miner's hat that seems to me to have harked back to the Roaring Twenties when donning absurd headgear was de rigeur for politicos. Did you ever see a photo of Calvin Coolidge in an Indian headdress? Stunning! Unfortunately, Dukakis skipped the part of the Dress For Success manual that said small men should avoid large headwear. The most absurd image of his campaign was Dukakis sitting in the open hatch of a tank wearing a tanker's helmet and commo rig. After that he was toast.

Lyndon Johnson deserves the credit for making poverty tours fashionable. Commercial network television, of all institutions, set the tone with prime-time documentaries like Harvest of Shame (CBS Reports, 1960 - aired after the election) and Walk In My Shoes (ABC Close-Up, 1961); and Michael Harrington's book The Other America probably played a role, too.

LBJ followed up his January 1964 announcement of a War on Poverty with his nine-state tour of poverty in Appalachia in 1964. He may have been treading some of the same ground as JFK four years earlier, but this time there was intentional focus on poverty.

Immitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, Johnson should have been gratified by the alacrity with which other Democrats launched their own tours of poverty or hunger. These included Fritz Hollings in South Carolina and Bill Spong in Virginia.

Give the Devil his due, to quote another old chestnut, LBJ deserves the credit (or blame as many Southerners thought) for pointing to backward conditions in a region struggling to attract industry from the north and overseas to take up the slack from the decline of agriculture.

You read it here first

U.S. warns citizens over Naples garbage crisis | U.S. | Reuters :

"U.S. citizens traveling to of through the area may encounter mounds of garbage, open fires with potentially toxic fumes, and/or sporadic public demonstrations by local residents attempting to block access to dumps,' the embassy said in an advisory note."

Reuters updates the garbage crisis which I noted here on the 3rd of June.

Family rallies to support Dr. Haneef questioned in Australia about London and Glasgow bomb plot

Doctor's family explains plane ticket, SIM card - National - theage.com.au

"THE in-laws of Dr Mohammed Haneef, arrested at Brisbane airport on Monday night and held awaiting the arrival of British police, have an explanation for his sudden departure.

"His daughter was born 10 days ago — sick, with jaundice — and his wife, Firdous Arshiya, is suffering the after-effects of giving birth."

Unanswered questions remain despite the headline on this story.

The baby was born more than a week before he left. So, Dr. Haneef seems to have had ample opportunity to notify his employer of his need to return to India to be with his wife and their ill newborn baby. The family insist he was planning to return to Australia with his wife and baby as soon as arrangements could be made. Any reasonably intelligent and responsible person, much more so a doctor employed at a hospital, tells his employer when he is leaving and gives some idea of when he expects to return.

The family's explanation for the one-way ticket is equally unconvincing. Wouldn't it be cheaper for the doctor to purchase a round-trip ticket with open return and a one-way ticket for the wife and infant than buying three one-way tickets?

I won't be surprised if the family's explanation about the cell phone angle - that Dr. Haneef gave the SIM card to his uncle - also turns out to give more heat than light on the case.

The Glorious Fourth

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

How far out in left field do you have to be to interview Ahmadinejad?

Iran rejects Stone film request: Entertainment: International: News24:

"'We have already seen his documentaries - even though Stone is considered a member of the opposition group in the US, it is still part of the Great Satan,' he said."

Oliver Stone may have been trendy-lefty enough to make a documentary out of an interview with Cuba's president for life, but that's not good enough for Ahmadinejad. Maybe Ahmadinejad is just too polite to say he was disappointed by the failure of Commandante (the Castro flick) to generate much business.

For all the lefties out there (and I do mean out there) who are looking for common ground with the likes of Ahmadinejad, the news that Stone is just another tool of the Great Satan's propaganda machine ought to be a wake-up call. Alas, the lesson they will take from this will likely be that they must redouble their attacks on Bush, Christianity, capitalism, etc. to enhance their appeal to truly enlightened leaders like Ahmadinejad.

Call this one "the doctors plot"

Local suspects linked to UK plots - National - theage.com.au:

"Dr Mohammed Haneef, 27, was picked up by members of a joint federal and Queensland police taskforce as he was about to leave Australia to India via Malaysia.

"He had a one-way ticket but had not resigned from the hospital."

Another Indian-trained Muslim doctor, Dr. Mohammed Ali, who also arrived from Britain a year ago, is currently under questioning. Police authorities in Australia were at pains to say that Dr. Ali's case was not related to the British investigation of the attack on Glasgow airport and the two car bombs found in London.

This disavowal seems odd since the article also points out that the car belonging to the fleeing Dr. Haneef was found in the garage of Dr. Ali.

Let's see, six of seven suspects arrested in Britain are doctors and two more doctors are being questioned in Australia. Another blow the the sociological interpretation which holds that radicalism is bred by poverty and lack of opportunity. Of course, 9/11 also showed the falsity of such explanations in that several key players in that affair were engineers, a profession respected and in demand in most of the world.

Unlike the "doctors plot" in which Stalin - either from delusional paranoia or political calculation - accused Jewish doctors of trying to poison him, this one appears to be real.

Socialism ruining Iranian economy, public support for Ahmadinejad fading

Iran curses Ahmadinejad over petrol rationing | International News | News | Telegraph :

"'We have hard-working shopkeepers in our neighbourhood from whom I get important economic information,' he [President Ahmadinejad] told Iranian newspapers recently. 'For example, there is an honourable butcher in our neighbourhood who is aware of all the problems.'"

Reminds me of Jimmy Carter getting advice on nuclear war from his daughter. No wonder Iran's economy is in a shambles. By the way, The Telegraph interviewed neighborhood shopkeepers but was unable to find that perspicacious butcher the president relies upon.

The article also notes that critics have labeled as "Stalinist" Ahmadinejad's promise to spend a billion dollars on steel, cement and petrochemical plants in the economically depressed eastern part of the country to create a million jobs.

This is preposterous on several levels. First, $1,000 per job is way too little money in such capital-intensive industries. Second, it takes a lot of infrastructure to bring in raw materials (the article says the nearest iron mines are 200 miles from the steel plant) and get finished product out. Third, this single project is supposed to suck up more than a third of the entire county's unemployment even though it occurs in one of its least populous regions and the country already faces a shortage of skilled labor of the sort such facilities require.

Ahmadinejad is supposed to be an engineer (Ph.D. in transportation engineering and planning), surely this all has occurred to him. Of course, after more than a decade in political office, maybe he's not thinking past his 2009 re-election campaign.

The current five-year plan of Iran seems as unreasonable as the socialist planning that stagnated India for decades. It is fitting, then, that current Iranian humor reflects the sort of cynicism in the old Soviet Union where a common saying was "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

Here's a sample of the reaction to the petrol price hike making the rounds as a text message on Iranian's cell phones (the samizdat of the new millenium):

"On the orders of President Ahmadinejad," read one, "those who are short of petrol can have a ride on the 17 million donkeys who voted for him."

A study in contasts

Floods are judgment on society, say bishops | Uk News | News | Telegraph :

"The bishops argued that while those affected are innocent victims, the flooding was a result of western civilisation's decision to ignore biblical teaching."

Here we have a bunch of staid and stuffy old bishops of one of Christianities oldest denominations saying that this year's floods in Britain are a divine judgment on everything from gay rights to environmental degradation.

Telegraph.co.uk reports it straight, no snarky adjectives like "remarkably," no "balancing" quotes from other religious figures, let alone politicians or spokesmen for gay rights who might presumably be offended. Contrast this to the way our press has jumped on preachers like Pat Robertson for making similar statements.

I'm not saying that natural disasters are divine retribution, although they could be. My point is the difference in press coverage. Amazing.

For a good article on the way the Labor government has failed to implement flood prevention in the areas now suffering, see this article. There are also links to photos and other coverage of the floods.