The China Syndrome

There's been a serious and ongoing uprising in Western China, between Muslim Uighurs and Chinese police. Apparently the police killed at least 150 people in the capital of Xinxiang Province, Urumqi, with thousands of injuries and even more arrests. The tensions between the ethnic majority Uighurs in this region and the Chinese government have long been known, and after years of cultural and political repression, things are spilling over.

In fact, the reason why the group of 17 Uighurs at Guantanamo could not be sent to China is because of pretty much this outcome - they would have been persecuted and possibly tortured. However, Andy McCarthy at NRO hears "Uighurs" and "riots" and decides to spin out this marvel:

The Wall Street Journal (as flagged in the NRO web briefing) reports on rioting in China by Uighur "students" that has left scores dead and hundreds wounded. The "students," described elsewhere in the story as from a "predominantly Muslim ethnic group[, which has] long chafed at restrictions on their civil liberties and religious practices imposed by a Chinese government fearful of political dissent," expressed their dissent by torching cars and buses, as well as — according to accounts of some witnesses to state-controlled media — rampaging "with big knives stabbing people" on the street.

No reason for non-Muslims in Bermuda, Palau, or the United States to worry, though. The lovable Uighurs are merely trying to address "economic and social discrimination." Once they get social justice, I'm sure they'll stop.

McCarthy decides that state-run media reports in China are credible enough to just regurgitate. And neoconservatives like McCarthy, who used to praise the stirrings of democracy in totalitarian regions, let that go when political points can be scored against a Democratic President.

Remarkable.

Ending Prison Rape

Being sentenced to prison is supposed to be the punishment. People who commit crimes should not be subject to another crime, the crime of rape, as a consequence of their incarceration. It's brutal, cruel and wrong. Too often, corrections facilities look the other way at this practice, thinking wrongly that it maintains order among their populations. I'm heartened that a commission has offered concrete steps for corrections officials to reduce and eventually eliminate prison rape.

The number of rapes committed by detention staff members and other inmates remains a subject of intense scrutiny. A 2007 survey of state and federal prisoners estimated that 60,500 inmates had been abused the previous year. But experts say that the stigma of sexual assault often leads to underreporting of incidents and denial by many of the victims.

Too often, the report says, sexual abuse of prisoners is viewed as a source of jokes rather than a problem with destructive implications for public health, crime rates and successful reentry of prisoners into the community.

"If you have a zero-tolerance policy on prison rape and it is known from the highest ranks that this will not be tolerated and there will be consequences for it, that goes a long way in sending a message," said U.S District Judge Reggie B. Walton, the commission chairman. "Just because people have committed crimes and are in prison, that doesn't mean that part of their punishment is being sexually abused while in detention."

These recommendations from the panel go to the Attorney General, who has a year to create national standards. Our jails are a mess, and reducing the brutal crime of rape will start us down the road of rehabilitating them.

And I'm pleased to have an ally in Eli Lehrer of the National Review. There's no reason for prison rape to ever be a partisan issue.

The federal report’s conclusions — a zero-tolerance policy, more direct monitoring, and the like — almost are all common sense. State, local, and federal governments should take immediate legislative and administrative action to implement nearly everything in the report. (Most of the practices are already commonplace in the federal and better-run state systems.) Although giving trial lawyers more business rarely makes sense, Congress may also want to reconsider laws that make it very difficult for prisoners to sue prison authorities absent concrete evidence of physical harm. It’s quite possible that many legitimate prison-rape claims get thrown out of court under current laws. And prison rape needs to stop.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but what the guy from the Competitive Enterprise Institute said.

Why National Review Loves Jake Tapper

The right-wing National Review posted a long mash note to ABC White House Correspondent Jake Tapper this week, claiming that he "isn’t afraid to go against the grain of the liberal consensus in pursuit of a story." Which stands to reason, since Tapper is the provenance of every lame right-wing hit on Obama throughout the Presidential election right on up to today. John Cole reminisces about a bunch of them (I forgot the one where he thought he smelled smoke on Obama's breath and got the vapors). It continues today.

Check out ABC News’ latest headline on Obama’s Europe trip:

President Obama to Europe: "Sorry About the Bush Years"

The only thing is that I can’t find any evidence that Obama said “sorry about the Bush years.”

My understanding is that it’s a no-no to put something that someone didn’t say between quotation marks, even if it’s a paraphrase.

Within a couple hours, Tapper killed the quotes and wrote: “This headline was mistakenly put in quotations; obviously the president never said that, it was meant to express the sentiment of his remarks. Apologies for any misunderstanding.”

Obviously.

Of course, it's out there now, so the conservative noise machine can continue its claim that anti-American Obama stirred up a hate nest in Europe. All thanks to, you guessed it, Jake Tapper.

Conservatives Off The Reservation

I don't think Ted Stevens can be pressured, but National Review gives it a shot.

One of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens’s most memorable moments of the last few years came during the Senate fight over the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” In 2005, when Sen. Tom Coburn introduced a measure that would have redirected the money Stevens had earmarked for the bridge to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, Stevens gave an apoplectic speech on the Senate floor in which he threatened to resign if the Senate passed the measure. It was the nation’s loss that the Senate voted the measure down, simultaneously missing two opportunities.

Now that a grand jury has indicted Stevens on seven counts of making false statements, it is time for him to make good on his threat. Stevens is of course innocent until proven guilty of the crimes with which he is charged. But even if he committed no crime, the facts that have emerged over the course of the federal investigation into his personal finances are damning enough on their own. The indictment was just the last straw.

Not to be outdone, the Wall Street Journal editorial page goes after the presumptive nominee for daring to shake the tax tree:

Mr. Stephanopoulos pressed, "So that means payroll tax increases are on the table, as well?" Here came the words that have caused the McCain campaign well deserved grief: "There is nothing that's off the table. I have my positions, and I'll articulate them. But nothing's off the table."

So given a chance to reiterate his opposition to tax increases -- and underscore a main contrast with his opponent -- Mr. McCain punted. Democrats were quick to pounce, with the Democratic National Committee issuing a press release headlined, "McCain Tax Pledge? Not so much." It provided citations of the presumptive GOP nominee asserting that "Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't." Expect the "nothing's off the table" line to show up in Democratic TV spots this fall.

The wandering candidate also put his chief economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, in an uncomfortable spot. Back in June, the McCain campaign went after Mr. Obama's proposal for a Social Security payroll tax increase on income above $250,000. A President McCain, his adviser then said, wouldn't consider a payroll tax increase "under any imaginable circumstances." So much for that.

Amazingly, the WSJ is really hitting McCain for being an undisciplined candidate more than anything. They acknowledge that he doesn't know crap about the economy and can't keep his positions straight. It's actually far more damning than just an anti-tax jihad.

All of these politicians, when they lose or are sent off to prison, will be excommunicated by conservatives, even though they have advocated for conservative policies for most of their entire careers. That's how it works.

Most Amusing Endorsement Editorial Ever

You have to love a Presidential endorsement editorial that starts with, essentially, "Nobody knows who the hell to vote for." So starts the Mitt Romney endorsement from the National Review, which Attaturk brilliantly calls a Mastubatorial.

Unlike some other candidates in the race, Romney is a full-spectrum conservative...

Well, yes, he's been liberal, moderate, conservative, pretty much everything.

While he has not talked much about the importance of resisting ethnic balkanization — none of the major candidates has — he supports enforcing the immigration laws and opposes amnesty.

Maybe because he's not allowed to talk about resisting ethnic balkanization if he wants to win the Republican primary - none of the major candidates are.

Uniting the conservative coalition is not enough to win a presidential election...

Because it's about 20% at this point...

Rudolph Giuliani did extraordinary work as mayor of New York and was inspirational on 9/11. But he and Mike Huckabee would pull apart the coalition from opposite ends: Giuliani alienating the social conservatives, and Huckabee the economic (and foreign-policy) conservatives. A Republican party that abandoned either limited government or moral standards would be much diminished in the service it could give the country.

This is actually good analysis, but pragmatism has long left the GOP, and social conservatives, as well as foreign policy conservatives, aren't likely to take kindly to being told to STFU.

Romney is an intelligent, articulate, and accomplished former businessman and governor. At a time when voters yearn for competence and have soured on Washington because too often the Bush administration has not demonstrated it, Romney offers proven executive skill.

Wow. National Review is endorsing the guy for running the Dukakis '88 campaign. From the same state, too. Inspiring!

Like any Republican, he would have an uphill climb next fall.

A rare moment of clarity...

His conservative accomplishments as governor showed that he can work with, and resist, a Democratic legislature.

Work with apparently equals resist now. It's the new math.

Some conservatives question his sincerity.

Some people question the dryness of water.

Romney has been plagued by the sense that his is a passionless, paint-by-the-numbers conservatism. If he is to win the nomination, he will have to show more of the kind of emotion and resolve he demonstrated in his College Station “Faith in America” speech.

You know, the resolve to insult large sections of the country by saying there's no place in the country for anyone without faith.

More than the other primary candidates, Romney has President Bush’s virtues and avoids his flaws.

i.e., all the unitary executivin' and Guantanamo doublin' without the bad elocution (yes, they literally list "better able to defend conservative positions in debate" as one of the virtues)!

It's kind of amusing that it's come to this for the conservative movement, pinning their hopes on the guy they think will keep intact the fragile conservative coalition, the same guy that hasn't had the same position on literally any issue since 2002.

And the best part is the howler of a cover picture:



Apparently, a sketch in an biology textbook (Fig 1.1 - average homo sapien) is running for President.

Those Dirty Arabs

I've been following from afar the National Review debacle. One of their correspondents was fabricating all kinds of things in Lebanon, claiming he witnessed accounts that he didn't see, etc. This is actually pretty much standard reporting for right-wing propaganda outlets, and barely worth a mention, except for the fact that these same outlets spent months and months hammering other news sources for their so-called bogus reporting.

But the proof in where the wingnuts lie on this issue came in Kathryn Jean Lopez' apology:

"[W]e “should have provided readers with more context and caveats” – the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn’t always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: “The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas.” While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him." (emphasis added)

Basically, the excuse for horrible reporting is that Arabs are filthy liars. I know, then National Review can leave the Middle East and stop relying on those sources. Just leave and stop endangering the world.

This assumption of superiority over the Muslim hordes can also be seen in Norman Podhoretz' reaction to the Iran NIE, which he views in the most obvious, sensible way: the CIA is trying to sabotage Bush, because they're promoting the views of those Muslim liars.

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”

The intimation here is obviously that the intelligence community will push to the front any lie given to them by "those people".

It should always be mentioned that N-Pod is a top national security advisor to Rudy Giuliani. This is the belief at the highest level.

Frederick of Hollywood's Speed Bump

There are now billing records confirming that Fred Thompson did abortion rights lobbying back in the 1980s. This comes after he repeatedly denied the story. It's of course not the act of flip-flopping itself here, but the fact that he denied it so vociferously KNOWING that there were surely billing records and documentation, that calls into question this guy's judgment under pressure. It's Bush-league in all senses of the term.

The National Review appears to be off the reservation:

But the picture is cloudier than it should be, because Thompson has been less than forthcoming about the evolution of his views. In April, he said that he was baffled that anyone would have thought he had been pro-choice. But debate clips, questionnaires, and constituent letters from the mid-1990s all establish that he was indeed pro-choice. And even his recent statements do not settle whether he shares the view of President Bush that abortion should be illegal with exceptions for rape, incest, and threats to the mother’s life [...]

Millions of Americans have changed their minds about abortion over the same years in which Thompson appears to have changed his. He should not hesitate to represent these voters.

Yet hesitate he does, because he knows that lying is the path to the nomination.

The words Not Read For and Prime Time come to mind...