After fighting it with every denial conversation he could come up with, he finally gets it:

It’s getting clearer. Valerie Plame was undercover and her outing was apparently deliberate and coordinated. If this pans out, it really is an outrageous piece of political malice. I may have misjudged this one at first, because I couldn’t quite see the motive behind it.

I’m still not totally clear, and it seems an extremely dumb and self-defeating tactic to me. But whatever the motive, if this is the nub of the story, the leakers need to be found, fired and prosecuted. I’ve written that before. But, listening to the Newshour testimony, my outrage level just went up a notch.

Now he’s got to come around on the bigger issue — it’s not just about leaking. It is a larger story of an administration that bullies those who raise questions. It is about a thuggish mentality that takes us back to the days of Nixon’s dirty tricks. It is about a government out of control and allergic to the truth.

One country, two systems? Like hell it is.

Straits Times today warns that China plans to “mobilise its supporters to prevent those in the pro-democracy camp from gaining control of the legislative council” in the next elections. I’m shocked.

Sources say Beijing will not let democrats and others in the opposition camp dominate the 60-seat legislature as they can then pass laws inimical to its interests, including those enabling universal suffrage and direct election of the Chief Executive.

If that should come to pass, China will have no choice but to veto such legislation, exercising powers granted by Hong Kong’s mini-constitution.

That, in turn, is sure to set off an outcry not only among Hong Kong people but also people worldwide, outraged by the perceived denial of the expressed popular will.

The article outlines the headaches China faces, as the next elections will be the first in HK since the half-million-man march and voter turnout is certain to be high and impassioned.

At his National Day address yesterday, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao cited SARS as a great learning experience and demonstration of how the government and its citizens can rise up to overcome obstacles:

Addressing more than 1,000 government officials and foreign diplomatic envoys at the Great Hall of the People, Wen heralded the national spirit and unity reflected in the war against SARS, which could be the foundation to achieve modernization of China….

China was caught by surprise by the onslaught of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), Wen said. The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council took a series of resolute measures, mobilizing and organizing the people throughout the country to wage a bitter campaign against the epidemic and thus far winning a significant victory.

I hope he doesn’t mind if I have a somewhat different picture of what SARS demonstrated about the CCP.

If the government hadn’t lied about SARS in the first place the crisis would never have reached the magnitude it did in March. Before “mobilizing and organizing the people” to fight SARS, they had mobilized the medical community and forced them to hide dying SARS patients in ambulances to keep the WHO unaware of them. So I look at grandiose speeches like this as Abu Sayaaf-style mumbo-jumbo.

A reminder: I love China. It’s just its government I can’t stand. I am dying to get back there, if only for a visit. There are people and places I miss so much, if I had the cash I would be off to Beijing and Shanghai every weekend. It’s dizzying to imagine how far such a great people could go with a truly legitimate government. Hypocrisies like the above SARS speech remind me just how slimy and self-serving the CCP scoundrels are.

When I recently visited Hong Kong, one of my old friends there asked me why my blog always refers to Andrew Sullivan, whom he had never heard of. It’s a good question. Liberal friends of mine ask me why I even read Sully at all. They all hate him.

There is only one magazine I subscribed to after college that I still subscribe to today, and that’s the New Republic. I remember many years ago how thrilled I was to learn that Andrew Sullivan was going to become its editor. He was young, something of a wunderkind, Oxford-educated, and open about his sexuality — something that at the time was simply unprecedented for such a visible position.

I also rememer how my enthusiasm rapidly dwindled as I learned that the new liberal prince I’d envisioned was conservative and outspoken in his love of the Republican Party. I felt betrayed, and I often felt like shouting back at his columns, I disagreed with him so vehemently. But whenever he wrote about social issues, I was always in total agreement. As much as he bothered me, I read him religiously.

I was a daily reader of his site long before the word Blog became part of the popular parlance. It’s the first thing I go to, whenever I turn my computer on. As usual, when he is on target he is the best commentator out there. When he goes into Republivcan attack-dog mode, which is sadly more the rule than the exception, I thoroughly loathe him.

I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt when I blast a Sullivan post, as I often do. It’s because of his touting the new medium called blogging that I started this site. Also, he was the one who put me on the map by linking to one of my most heartfelt posts back in January.

I want to believe that he really knows, deep in his heart, how pooI guess maybe I hope that if I say it loud enough, Sullivan will hear me and, eventually, renounce his Republicanism and see the light. I feel it’s only a matter of time that he finally recognizes that oil and water won’t mix, that in the eyes of his beloved Republicans — as in the eyes of his beloved Church — he is The Enemy.

There’s a good article in Time Asia on what the Chinese police are capable of:

The police insisted it was a model bust. They’d stopped a taxi on its way into the industrial city of Lanzhou on the fringe of the Gobi Desert. While some officers pointed their guns at driver Jing Aiguo’s temple, others retrieved from the back seat of the car nine plastic sacks containing three kilos of heroin.

Jing had never run afoul of the law before, but the police—then engaged in one of China’s periodic “Strike Hard” crime crackdowns—quickly obtained his confession. After a one-hour trial, the judge announced his sentence: death.

Before Jing could be executed, however, fortune handed him a reprieve. Lanzhou police arrested a dealer who admitted that he had helped officers set Jing up for a drug rap. Jing won a second trial—and the real story came out.

The arresting officers had planted the heroin. They had coerced Jing’s confession by shocking him with electric batons and hanging him by his handcuffed wrists until “the blood poured down my arms,” Jing testified during his trial. By the time of his release last January, the cab driver had spent more than a year on death row and hadn’t seen his family in 518 days. He received just $4,000 in compensation for his ordeal—less than he would have earned driving his cab.

Another shocker. I just have to wonder, here’s a story of a man who lived to tell about it. How many others does this happen to who aren’t so lucky? I suspect we cannot begin to imagine. As the reporter goes on to explain, it all ties back to a political system in which there’s no checks and balances, nobody charged with overseeing what the police are doing.

I need reminders like this every now and then to appreciate how fortunate I am to live in a free country.

Incestuous Amplification has written a fine post on the Republicans’ self-destructive obsession with smearing Clark. (A couple of the comments are pretty awesome, too.)

I especially appreciated this insight:

To me, the most amusing aspect of this particular fantasy of Billary controlling Clark is how much the right miscalculates the American public’s attitude toward the Clintons. Rush and company believe that if they can keep pounding the idea of the Clintons pulling Clark’s strings, that the public will turn on him and they’ll have Dean to work over next year instead of the General. They are in effect hoping that their own irrational Clinton-hatred will be scooped up by the public and then somehow transferred to Clark.

Nice scenario, but there’s only one small problem…most of America doesn’t hate the Clintons, as the below article expands upon. Sure, on the right there is a deep-seated hate…but it doesn’t extend any further than that. Just look at the sales receipts for Hillary’s book, as well as the rock-star like book signing tour she took, and you’ll realize that while she’s a polarizing figure…she’s not Bin Laden. The same holds for Bill. The longer he’s out of office, the further Lewinskygate fades, and there are no indications that simply linking his name to Clark will do more harm than good.

Bravo. Well said.

Sullivan must have read my last post; now he’s commenting on Wilson-Plame, but like Instapundit he’s too confused to really say anything about it.

He keeps asking why the administration would do something this stupid, which is certainly a valid question. But the one who says that indeed the administration didgive him the leak is a right-wing friend of the Administration, not a leftie troublemaker.

Now, administrations do lots of stupid things, like breaking into the Watergate or ordering secret arms sales to Contras or covering things up or — well, the list goes on. Just because it seems hare-brained doesn’t mean they didn’t do it. (And in this instance their strategy worked, at least in the short term; Wilson went apoplectic, and for months it looked like no one was going to cover it.)

Another stupid thing the administration’s doing is helpfully handing out phone records of Wes Clark’s calls to the White House but refusing to give out phone records of Roves’ calls to journalists on that fateful day. Imagine if the last president were to behave this way. Any little thing Clinton did, proven or otherwise, would ignite Sully like dynamite, while here all he can do is obfuscate and stammer.

Update: Karl Rove may not be the man. But check out the link; it sure sounds like Bush does know who the perpetrator is.

This story is great because it is so cut and dry. I mean, Robert Novak admitted he got the tip about Plame from a senior Administration official, so no questions there. And outing undercover agents is definitely illegal as hell. So where’s the confusion?

Yet InstaPundit says it’s “too complicated” for him to take a stand. And Sullivan has been stone-cold silent. Not a peep, not a comma, nothing.

This could be the moment of truth, Bush and Co. finally hoisted on their own petard, and Sully is going on in a manner that can only be described as surreal about how the worst in Iraq may well be over again and peace and joy are just around the corner.

Pretending it isn’t there won’t make this go away. This is trouble indeed, and it’s just starting.

Reporters Without Borders is calling for the immediate release of a 32-year-old “cyber dissident” who faces a 15-year prisoin sentence for his egregious crimes:

Li Zhi was arrested by state security police on 8 August at his home in Dazhou, in the southwestern province of Sichuan. The US-based organisation Human Rights in China said he had criticised the government in online forums and was thus regarded as being in touch with foreign-based opponents. Police seized his computer but provincial officials refused to say anything about the offending material….

It said he was being targeted as part of a broader government crackdown that showed once more the complete official intolerance of online freedom of expression. Government surveillance of e-mail messages and discussion forums to track down regime dissidents was unacceptable, it added.

This is a very interesting site for anyone concerned about repression of the media; I’m glad I stumbled onto it.

It just might happen. What a bombshell. I’ve been wondering for six months now where the outrage was over Rove’s dirty tricks. Now it looks like it’s on the way, and there may be no way out. As Kleiman points out, the crime carries a 10-year prison sentence.

Kleiman also says if Wes Clark is shrewd he will jump on this bandwagon with everything he’s got. Let’s hope so. Fasten your seatbelts.