Jesus’ General writes racist-in-residence Michelle Malkin a letter that’s too, too devastating:

One of the greatest dangers we face as a nation–a danger you’ve noted on your own blog–is the growing numbers of “anchor babies:”

During my book tour across the country for Invasion, this issue came up time and again. In the Southwest, everyone has a story of heavily pregnant women crossing the Mexican border to deliver their “anchor babies.” At East Coast hospitals, tales of South Korean “obstetric tourists” abound. (An estimated 5,000 South Korean anchor babies are born in the US every year). And, of course, there’s a terrorism angle…The time is ripe to reassess drive-by citizenship and what it means to be an American.

Indeed, it is a tremendous problem. Just in the last week, a poster at your own immigration blog called it a “recipe for social disaster,” and Rep Dave Reichert (R-Mescaline), reported that border area parking lots are becoming little more than large open air maternity wards, awash with discarded placentas and the wrappers of those nasty tamarind flavored candies from Mexico.

So how does all of this lead me to ask you to make a sacrifice? Well, it’s come to my attention that you too may be an “anchor baby.” Just a little over thirty-six years ago, it appears that a foreign sperm cell hooked up with a foreign egg somewhere near Manila and a Blastocyst-Filipina named proto-Michelle was formed. Within a few weeks, little proto-Michelle moved from the Philippines to New York City where she finally acquired “drive-by citizenship” on Oct. 20, 1970.

Now that this is out in the open, you must renounce your citizenship. Given your previous statements about anchor babies, it’s the only honorable thing you can do.

You can rest assured that your sacrifice will help your beloved anti-immigrant movement immensely, and that you’ll continue to have our eternal gratitude long after we demand your deportation.

Michelle, what do you have to say? We’re all waiting – anchor babe.

Update: I can’t resist stealing the photo The General posted of Our Lady of the Concentration Camps:

Thanks heavens for cheap labor. And many thanks to ESWN for the translation of this hugely upsetting article. I see this as an act of murder, or at least negligent homicide.

“I’m very tired …” Late at night on May 30, a 35-year-old female named Gan Hongying who worked at a garment factory in the Haizhu district of Guangzhou city died in a rented apartment. The doctor’s note: Cause of death is sudden death. Prior to this, from May 27 to May 30, the factory was in a rush to complete a job and Gan Hongying worked from morning past midnight every day. During the four days, she worked 54 hours and 25 minutes, including 22 hours of overtime work. When she was alive, she frequently mentioned that “I really want to catch a good sleep.” Gan Hongying used to be a female teacher in Sichuan, but came down south to work when the kindergarten was closed.

35-year-old Gan Hongying (originally named Feng Hongxia, but she later changed to her mother’s last name) stopped breathing in the rented house.

It was 11:59pm on the night of May 30, one minute before the day of the Dragon Boat Festival.

Two and half hours ago, she spoke her last words to her sister Feng Yuzhu: “I’m very tired. Give me the door key. I will go and take a rest at your place.”

At the Xinhai Hospital, the doctor wrote on the patient’s record: The patient’s “cause of death: sudden death.”

….On early morning of May 31, the reporter went to the factory dormitory at number 40 Lujiangxi road. The workers from more than 10 garment factories around Lujiangxi road sleep here. There was filthy water all around and the stench was disgusting. We followed the long and dark staircase up. After some twists and turns, we arrived at the room of Gan Hongying. The room was probably proximate to a waste water ditch, so the stench was particularly strong. The room was filthy, without even a single light. The roommates recalled that because they worked overtime so often, they were usually very tired when they came back. Since Gan Hongying used to work as a teacher, she probably had never worked so hard in her life. Therefore, her fatigue was particularly obvious. 15-year-old female worker Xiao Xia slept on the next bed to Gan Hongying, and she said that Gan often got colds: “She said that she only wanted to rest well and get a good sleep.”

At 4:30am in the morning on May 31, the space in front of New Wave Star factory was empty. When the woman guarding the front door said “We just finished working,” the accompanying factory person gave her a look to stop her from saying anything further. At the end of the factory line where Gan Hongying worked, there was still a whole basket full of unfinished materials. Several workers told the reporter privately that the workers at this factory usually sign in at 9am, pause at 11:30am, and return to work from 12:30pm until 5:30pm. Then they go into overtime from 6:30pm onward and usually end at midnight.

The workers say that they are fined 20 yuan if they show up late. If there is a rush job, “they get off whenever the work is done,: Several workers said the factory locks the gate so that the workers can only leave when they finish. If they do not finish, the workers will have to pay for the unfinished products. “In order to make money and not get penalized, we have to keep working hard.”

Globalization. It raises so many questions, like, “Wouldn’t you be willing to pay a little more for those shoes to know that no one had to undergo enslavement or death to make them?” When all that matters is competition and cost cutting, where does humankind come into the equation? Whatever happened to the quaint notion that part of a company’s purpose was to contribute to and nourish its community? Whatever happened to the quaint notion that people matter? We can repeat until we are blue in the face the hackneyed adage, “Our people are our greatest asset.” But it’s alie; it runs counter to today’s global business model, where the main mission is to get rid of as much human capital as possible, and to pay the remaining bodies the lowest amount possible (which means, send the work to China).

I have no solution to the problem. All I know is that it’s an enormous problem, and that today’s “cutting-edge, out-of-the-box, best-in-class” business models contradict what business should really be about.

The estate tax – one of the most illuminating examples of modern-day propaganda. It will affect a teensy sliver of the population, yet the Republicans, in their perennial role as water carriers for the filthy rich, have managed to hoodwink many of us into believing this is a “death tax” imposed on all of us. Note that they never call it an “estate tax,” but always the “death tax,” which focus groups show is more effective at alarming the masses. (For a fine description of why the estate tax is in keeping with our Founding Fathers’ vision of America, read Kevin Philip’s great book American Dynasty, in which he writes, “The huge concentration of wealth in the United States would quickly become just what many of America’s founders especially feared, an aristocracy of wealth that was not self-made but inherited.”) To repeal it now, when the Treasury needs every dollar it can get, would be insane. Paul Krugman comments:

Shameless in the Senate
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 5, 2006

The Senate almost voted to repeal the estate tax last fall, but Republican leaders postponed the vote after Hurricane Katrina. It’s easy to see why: the public might have made the connection between scenes of Americans abandoned in the Superdome and scenes of well-heeled senators voting huge tax breaks for their even wealthier campaign contributors.

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[Update: The BBC article regferenced below turns out to be from long ago – sorry about that confusion (see comments for more information). Meanwhile, the reports from other bloggers and readers in China of Google currently being blocked seem to be accurate, though the block appears to be sporadic; it’s probably linked to yesterday’s anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Let’s hope that the ban is a temporary one.]

For much of the time when I lived in China, Google was banned along with the NY Times, Washington Post, BBC and, of course, countless other sites. Then, as suddenly as the ban was imposed, it was lifted – at least for several of those sites (not the BBC). Now, it appears the ban is back for Google. This is odd, to say the least, since Google has bent over backwards to appease accommodate the boys in Beijing. (I also find it odd that the article states categorically that this is the first time Beijing has blocked a search engine. Everyone living in Beijing in 2002 most likely remembers when Google was unavailable.)

So can you access Google in China now, or is this another case where the ban comes and goes, seemingly at whium?

Thanks to Keir in the forum for bringing this up.

[Update: I’m removing the pictures, but I think you should see them, over here. You should see who these enemies are we’re killing.]

Well, I guess that settles that: the Army is telling us this was acceptable and within the rules of engagement.

Horrific images of Iraqi adults and children have fueled new allegations that U.S. troops killed civilians in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi. But ABC News has learned that military officials have completed their investigation and concluded that U.S. forces followed the rules of engagement.

A senior Pentagon official told ABC News the investigation concluded that the allegations of intentional killings of civilians by American forces are unfounded. Military commanders in Iraq launched an investigation soon after the mid-March raid in the village of Ishaqi, about 50 miles north of Baghdad.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell will make a statement about the Ishaqi allegations today in Baghdad, ABC News has learned.

In Ishaqi, American forces were going after a high-value terrorist target they succeeded in apprehending. The U.S. military reported in March that four people died when the troops destroyed a house from the air and ground. But previously unaired video shot by an AP Television News cameraman at the time shows at least five children dead, several with obvious bullet wounds to the head. One adult male is also seen dead.

“Children were stuck in the room, alone and surrounded,” an unidentified man said on the video.

A total of 11 people died, according to Iraqis on the scene. The Iraqis said the people were killed by U.S. troops before the house was destroyed.

Now onto Haditha. I sure hope there’s no cover-up going on here, as that would be the last thing the US military needs at this point. News of an Ishaqi cover-up would cost us hearts and minds in Iraq – if there are any hearts and minds that are left.

Teaching Remedial Decency
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 3, 2006

Before the war, America railed against the Iraqi leader for slaughtering innocent Iraqis. Now the Iraqi leader is railing against America for slaughtering innocent Iraqis.

Iraq is blustering about sending away American troops to make life better for Iraqis, after American troops were sent in to make life better for Iraqis.

With fury swirling over the Haditha massacre and the shooting on Wednesday of two women, one of whom might have been pregnant and on the way to a hospital, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki laced into the American military, accusing it of regular attacks on civilians that were “completely unacceptable” and pledging his own inquiry on Haditha.

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And these guys were once considered Bush’s staunchest supporters. After all, Bush was all about state’s rights and small government and minimal interference in the lives of American citizens. Which is why, as the Cato blogger points out, the obscenely titled “Marriage Protection Amendment” is an aberration, an exercise in the most cynical and shameless sort of hypocrisy.

Here’s a new topic for Chairman Sensenbrenner’s suddenly awake Judiciary Committee: “RECKLESS JUSTICE: Does the Marriage Protection Amendment Trample the Constitution?� Of course, the case seems open and shut. In the landmark Lopez case a decade ago, Chief Justice Rehnquist opened with the basics: “We start with first principles. The Constitution establishes a government of enumerated powers.�

Marriage law has always been reserved to the states in our federal system. Law professor Dale Carpenter calls the Marriage Protection Amendment, which the Senate will debate and vote on next week, “a radical intrusion on the nation’s founding commitment to federalism in an area traditionally reserved for state regulation� in his Cato study released today.

Conservatives claim to believe in federalism, until the states do things they don’t like. Then they turn into New Deal liberals, believing that the federal government should correct the errors of the 50 states. The proposed Marriage Protection Amendment would not just protect states from being forced to recognize same-sex marriages made in other states, as some proponents claim. It would forbid any of the several states from deciding — through court decision, legislative action, or even popular initiative — to extend marriage to gay couples. Depending on the interpretation of its language, it may even ban civil unions and domestic partnerships.

Of course, it’s not good lawmaking to propose an amendment to the Constitution whose language is so unclear, even to its supporters. But then, this really isn’t lawmaking. Majority Leader Bill Frist knows the amendment won’t pass the Senate next week. It failed in 2004 and is likely to get only a handful more votes this time. A majority leader usually doesn’t bring legislation to the floor that he knows will fail. Frist must have some other purpose in mind in bring this amendment up for a futile vote.

It doesn’t matter whether you are for or against gay marriage. It’s a matter of staining the Constitution with this slimy piece of grafitti, perhaps the most unnecessary, absurd and disgusting piece of legislation conceived since….well, you decide. And imagine, it’s being resurrected now, as we enter the mid-term election season. Fancy that.

I’ve talked about China’s campaign to position the sleepy Yunnan town of Zhongdian as Shangri La in an earlier post (which you can check out for my stunning photos and cutting-edge analysis). From a marketing/PR perspective, it’s a textbook example of repackaging. Slap a new name on a city, get the marketing machine rolling and, voila, you’ve got James Hilton fans flying over in droves, convinced they can live their cherished fantasy of finding the Lost Horizon that Hilton described nestled in the foothills of Tibet. The Guardian today has an insightful article on what a coup this is.

Flashing red neon tubes light up the way to the karaoke bar in Shangri-la’s Paradise hotel, where guests are invited to buy the company of hostesses: 100 yuan (£7) to sing for an hour, 200 yuan for a shared dance.

Five minutes further on is the Shangri-la “Old Town”, built from scratch in the past two years. The elegantly carved wooden buildings are already full of trinket sellers offering fluffy yaks, prayer beads and ceremonial daggers, while black-market hawkers walk the cobbled streets touting fake Rolex watches and Ray-Ban sunglasses.

Article continues
It is probably not what James Hilton had in mind when he dreamed up Shangri-la in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon. But, in one of the most audacious rebranding exercises in history, this scruffy but spectacularly located Himalayan town has been renamed after the British author’s fictional utopia and designated a tourist paradise by order of the Chinese government.

The transformation of this once remote community into a sightseeing hub is part of a new phase of China’s economic expansion, which is taking the modernisation drive into some of the most remote places on earth, reducing poverty but ruining the environment…..

[C]onservationists face a losing battle against the 100 tour operators, hotel chains and travel agents in Shangri-la that are keen to grab a slice of the 50bn yuan budget allocated by Beijing to develop tourism in Shangri-la in the next decade. “Overall tourism is good. If we didn’t have this, we would rely on logging or mining, which are more destructive,” said Ziren Pingcuo, a Tibetan photographer and environmental activist. “But it is hurting the ecology, it is ruining the atmosphere of sacred places, and not enough of the benefits are passed on to local people.”

It is the same story across China’s least developed – and most beautiful – regions, which are now opening up to foreign visitors and domestic tourists from the wealthy eastern seaboard. In the past five years, the number of domestic tourist visits has increased from 744 million to 1.2 billion.

The rural landscape of Shangri-la remains bucolic, but the town is anything but an idyll. In one restaurant beggars enter to ask for money. A group of soldiers, reluctant to interrupt a drinking game that has one of them throwing up beside the table, shoos them away. “Don’t bother us. Go and ask the foreigner for money.” The closer you get to Shangri-la, the further it seems from utopia.

Zhongdian was interesting. Utopia it is surely not. I had planned to stay there three days, but cut it down to two. That’s more than enough time to see the temple and the yaks. If you go there looking for Lost Horizon, trust me, you’re in the wrong place.

Update: I’m now seeing articles questioning RFK Jr’s methodology, so I’m not sure I can endorse his arguments. Time will tell – everything comes out in the wash.

Up-update: On the other hand, I’m still inclined to believe the bulk of the Rolling Stone story.

At least we can’t fault him for lack of consistency – consistently using dirty tricks and fraud to “win” the White House. I was suspicious back then, and am convinced now: John Kerry was the real winner of the 2004 presidential election, just as Al Gore was the winner in 2000. This astonishing article should move earth and heaven.

Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes. In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House….

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states — including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida — and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush’s neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina. Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000. “Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,” a Fox News analyst declared, “or George Bush loses.”

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities — as much as 9.5 percent — with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. “As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,” he says, “it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.”

“Read the whole thing,” if you’ve got the strength to do so. You simply will not believe your eyes. The examples of fraud are spelled out explicitly, with names and footnotes. In earlier times, I would have dismissed such stories as conspiratorial nonsense. Not so in the Age of Bush, where fraud, corruption, dirty tricks and bold-faced lies are simply standard procedure. So before the inevitable acucations of paranoia and delusional thinking come flying in, read the piece and gather your arguments.

Krugman on Paulson, our new Treasury Secretary. Bottom line: truth is this administration’s third rail.

Secretary, Protect Yourself
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 2, 2006

So you decided to take the job, after all. It’s no surprise that they wanted you. As the joke that’s making the rounds puts it, they’re so desperate they’re scraping the top of the barrel. But most of us are surprised that you accepted.

No doubt you received assurances that like Robert Rubin, but unlike your predecessors in this administration, you’ll get to be a real Treasury secretary. And you probably believe that those assurances can be trusted, if only because the Bush people currently need you a lot more than you need them.

But Paul O’Neill, who received tremendous acclaim from the news media when he was appointed Treasury secretary, must have believed the same thing. The fact is that you’ll be treated well as long as you are perceived as someone who adds credibility with people outside the administration, and not a moment longer. Yet I’m sure you’re already under pressure to say things that will fatally undermine your credibility.

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