Brilliant post from Kevin Drum:

George Bush, fresh out of Yale, uses family connections to join the Air National Guard in order to avoid serving in Vietnam. After four years of a six-year term he decides to skip his annual physical, is grounded, and heads off to Alabama, where he blows off even the minimal annoyance of monthly drills for over six months.

Conservative reaction: why are you impugning the patriotism of this brave man? He got an honorable discharge and that’s as much as anyone needs to know.

John Kerry, fresh out of Yale, enlists in the Navy and requests duty in Vietnam. While there, according to the Boston Globe, he wins a Purple Heart and then follows that up with more than two dozen missions in which he often faced enemy fire, a Silver Star for an action in which he killed an enemy soldier who carried a loaded rocket launcher that could have destroyed his six-man patrol boat, a Bronze Star for rescuing an Army lieutenant who was thrown overboard and under fire, and two more Purple Hearts.

Conservative reaction: Hmmm, that first injury wasn’t very serious. This, of course, is something that deserves careful and drawn-out investigation, and it would certainly be unfair to impugn “craven or partisan motives” to those doing the impugning.

Are these guys a piece of work, or what?

Watching Fox News today (something I do too much) I was struck by how hard they are working to find something incriminating in Kerry’s record. Like, maybe his wounds weren’t that bad. They are obsessed.

As Drum points out, the questions about Bush’s National Guard service pop right up at you. On the other hand, even an idiot (even a Fox News idiot!) has to see that Kerry was a war hero, plain and simple. The obsessive race to find chinks in his record and discredit him is astounding. Disgusting, too. And pathetic.

Simon has a good post on this abstruse topic.

Nicholas Kristof’s new column on North Korea’s nuclear threat is disturbing on at least two levels, the threat itself and the Bush administration’s efforts to divert public attention away from it.

In the summer of 2001, there was a spike in Al Qaeda “chatter” and mounting evidence that a terror strike was imminent. But without precise details, it was difficult to get the attention of top policy makers or the public — until it was too late.

Now something similar is happening in North Korea.

North Korea is potentially more dangerous than the mess in Iraq. It probably has at least 1 to 3 nuclear weapons already, it is producing both plutonium and uranium, and it is on track to have close to 10 nuclear weapons by the end of this year.

Yet because President Bush’s policy has failed in North Korea, Washington is determinedly looking the other way. When we next focus on North Korea, after the election, it could be a nuclear Wal-Mart.

North Korea not only has genuine nuclear weapons programs, but it is also the model of a rogue state: it gets its U.S. currency by printing it. That’s right; it counterfeits excellent American $100 bills.

The latest disclosure, via David “Scoop” Sanger of The Times, is that the father of Pakistan’s bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, claims that North Korea showed him three nuclear weapons in 1999. The Bush administration, after publicizing anything to do with Iraqi W.M.D., tried to keep that North Korean revelation secret.

After painting a most bleak scenario, Kristof gives us the money quote:

Resolving this crisis is in the interests of virtually everybody on the planet, with two exceptions: President Bush and Mr. Kim. They may have nothing else in common, except that their fathers also ran their countries, but they do share an interest in delay.

Mr. Bush has his hands full with Iraq and doesn’t want attention paid to the North Korean nuclear threat, which is substantially worsening on his watch. Mr. Kim figures that he may as well wait to see whether John Kerry is elected, and he’d also like to finish reprocessing the plutonium and enriching the uranium.

How did things get to be this awful? The threat of Iraqi WMD was nothing compared to this. And Bush is running on a platform of national security.

Not surprising, of course:

Anyone who tuned into CCTV-4, China’s all-news television channel, at shortly after 10 a.m. last Thursday could have watched Mr. Cheney deliver an address to students at Fudan University in Shanghai. A State Department linguist provided simultaneous interpretation.

The broadcast, however, received no advance billing in the Chinese news media and was not repeated. And authorities promptly plastered leading web sites with a “full text” of the vice president’s remarks, including his answers to questions after the speech, that struck out references to political freedom, Taiwan, North Korea and other issues that propaganda officials considered sensitive.

The censorship showed that even a hopeful sign of political progress in China can be more like a mirage. Officials sought to convey a relaxed attitude about what Mr. Cheney might say in public even as they worked behind the scenes to alter the record, analysts say.

“What they do to control the media is sometimes surreal,” says Yu Maochun, a China expert at the United States Naval Academy who noticed discrepancies between Mr. Cheney’s speech and the Chinese transcript of the address. “Censorship is a habit they can’t kick.”

Check the article to see which phrases were excised, and how wishy-washy US officials were in their response.

I just saw Dick Cheney on the news, fawning over the gun that the NRA handed him today. He looked totally intoxicated, gaping at the rifle with an almost leering grin. It immediately brought to mind another picture (and it sure took me a long time to find it on the Web). Compare.

And here’s Cheney’s nemesis:

No, I am not saying Cheney is comparable to Saddam. But seeing Cheney with the gun and the two minions on either side brought back a vivid memory of the Saddam photo. Obviously Cheney is no Saddam (which doesn’t mean I like him), but I found the similarities of the pictures to be eerily striking.

“FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS!”

I hope you can take some time to read one of the most poignant posts you’ll ever read on the nightmares facing Hepatitis B carriers (“HBVers”) in China. Chilling, thought-provoking, infuriating.

If you visit Asian Labour News regularly (and you should), you’re well familiar with the myriad safety hazards that are par for the course in the Chinese workplace. Explosions, cave-ins, toxic gas emissions — they hardly even raise an eyebrow, they are such everyday stories.

Still, a recent article on maimed factory works in Shenzhen caught my eye, if only for the fact that the problem is so severe and affects so many Chinese workers, and the government totally fails to enforce the laws in place to prevent such atrocitites. It’s one of those articles where every line is quotable, so I’m just going to post the whole thing, with emphasis added.

SAVAGE FORM OF CAPITALISM: Chinese factory workers risk limbs to hold jobs

BY TIM JOHNSON
FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF

SHENZHEN, China — The Pingshan People’s Hospital in the thriving industrial city of Shenzhen has a ward devoted to hand injuries.

In one room, Yan Kaiguo, 23, cradles his bandaged right hand. April 8, a machine at an electronic circuit-board plant crushed part of his index finger.

Yan feels lucky he lost only part of his finger, down to the first knuckle. He’s confident he’ll get back his job, which pays about $96 a month.

“Every day, we get five or six cases like this and sometimes over a dozen,” said a hand surgeon at another large Shenzhen hospital, who asked that neither he nor his hospital be identified for fear of reprisal from city officials. “Most of the machines are old and semiautomatic. The workers have to put their hands into the machines.”

In a grim replay of the industrial revolution in the United States and other countries, industrial machinery will crush or sever the arms, hands and fingers of some 40,000 Chinese workers this year, government-controlled news media report. Some experts privately say the true number is higher.

A majority of the accidents occurs in metalworking and electronics plants with heavy stamping equipment, shoe and handbag factories with leather-cutting equipment, toy factories and industrial plastics plants with blazing hot machinery.

In Shenzhen’s hospital wards, maimed factory workers nurse mangled hands and forearm stumps. They tell of factory managers who’ve removed machine safety guards that slowed output and of working on decrepit, unsafe machinery. Workers toiling 100 hours a week grow dazed from fatigue, then lose their fingers to machines.

Local officials routinely overlook appalling safety conditions, worried that factory owners will relocate. They send mutilated migrant workers back to distant rural villages, shunting the burden of workplace injuries onto poorer inland provinces.

The workplace carnage is bitterly ironic in a communist country founded on principles of protecting downtrodden workers and peasants. Karl Marx, were he alive, would probably see an echo of the labor conditions in mid-19th-Century England that gave rise to his communist principles.

Chinese Communist Party leaders are so eager to maintain high economic growth and to create jobs for tens of millions of potentially restive Chinese that they now preside over a savage form of capitalism. It’s one in which maimed migrant workers can readily be discarded. Independent labor unions are banned. Workers are placed in front of machines for endless stretches.

But labor monitors say foreign companies that relentlessly demand lower prices and U.S. consumers who gobble up low-cost goods contribute to the problem.

Zhou Litai, a lawyer who represents hundreds of workers maimed or killed on the job, said foreign consumers should be aware that some “Made in China” products “are tainted with blood from cut-off fingers or hands.”

Former U.S. Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich., long an advocate of worker and union rights, called the Chinese record on worker safety horrendous.

“Worker safety is a very important issue in the free trade debates, because, if you go to places like China, worker safety is not considered a priority, and as a result there are far too many worker deaths.

“If we continue to move in the direction of these same new trade regimes, you’re going to see more and more workers injured and losing their lives, and that’s one of the issues that’s in the forefront in the discussions.”

Smaller factory owners have no leverage with global buyers and are always worried they’ll be replaced by other suppliers, so they try to make money rapidly, said Chen Ka-wai, the assistant director of the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, a watchdog group that monitors working conditions on the mainland.

Stories of dismembered workers are numbingly similar. Usually, the migrant worker is a recent arrival to one of China’s coastal industrial zones. He or she takes any job offered, no matter the conditions. With no safety training, the worker is assigned to an unfamiliar machine.

Wang Xuebing, a 19-year-old from Hubei province in central China, came to Shenzhen and got a job in July in a metalworking plant. A month later, his foreman escorted a work crew to a different factory owned by a friend and “asked me and two coworkers to operate a metal mold machine,” Wang said.

The machine made casings for air conditioners, using tons of pressure to mold sheeting. Wang said the machine went on the fritz but was rigged to work again.

“When I placed a metal sheet in the machine, it pressed down. My hand was severed. I lost consciousness,” Wang recalled.

Zhu Qiang came to the Pearl River Delta region from inland Sichuan province in early 2002. March 2 of that year, he got a job making industrial plastic and shopping bags. Two weeks later, while working a 16-hour shift, he lost his right hand.

“We were extremely tired. We were nodding our heads, almost asleep,” Zhu said. “My hand got tangled with the plastic and got burned. I was rushed to the hospital. There was no way to save my hand.”

For the loss of his right hand, 22-year-old Zhu was given about $4,800. China’s state-owned media mention more frequently the staggering number of workplace injuries, especially in the region that includes Shenzhen, near Hong Kong.

“There are at least 30,000 cases of finger losses each year in the Pearl River Delta factories, and the total number of fingers being cut off by machines is over 40,000,” the China Youth Daily, a state-owned national newspaper, said in a short report March 13.

Chinese media call Yongkang in coastal Zhejiang province the “finger-cutting city.” Yongkang’s 7,000 small factories make tools, and some 1,000 workers in those factories lose fingers or hands each year, the Metropolis Express newspaper said Feb. 18.

“The majority of them will be immediately fired by the owners,” said the Web site run by the Communist Party’s national newspaper, People’s Daily. “The compensation for each cut-off finger is 500 yuan,” or about $60, roughly a month’s salary.

For a young person, losing a hand spells doom. With as many as 20 million healthy people clamoring for jobs each year, factory owners never hire disabled people. Dismembered workers are condemned to destitution and often loneliness.

“With no money, it’s hard to find a girlfriend,” said Sun Hongyuan, 28, a worker who lost his right hand several years ago.

In Washington last month, the AFL-CIO petitioned the Bush administration to demand that it pressure China to increase wages and improve working conditions. Acting under a 1974 trade law, the labor group said Chinese workers suffer “staggering rates of injuries, illness and death” because the nation unfairly scrimps on workplace safety and denies a series of worker rights. The administration has until early May to rule on the request.

In China, laws abound, but enforcement is often lacking.

“China has a series of laws protecting workers’ rights and interests. They are probably better than in some Western countries. But they don’t apply it, particularly at the local level,” said Zhou, the labor lawyer.

Maybe there are all these mutiliations because China is so big, government inspectors can’t oversee everything. But hey, they have the time, money and resources to watch over what people are doing on the Internet, and to enroll everyone in the hukou system and enforce it with a vengeance. They have time to enforce their repression of HBVers. They have time to churn out maudlin self-congratulatory drivel in their media, telling you all what a great job they are doing taking care of you.

Does it say something about their priorities?

Could it happen anywhere but China?

The article in the Beijing Evening News told a shocking story of American hubris: Congress was behaving like a petulant baseball team and threatening to bolt Washington, D.C., unless it got a new, modern Capitol building, complete with retractable roof.

There was a problem with the story. Rather than do his own original reporting, Evening News writer Huang Ke had cribbed, nearly word for word, his text from an American publication. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Ke hadn’t bothered to vet the source he had plagiarized: The Onion.

At first, the Evening News stood by its story, demanding proof it wasn’t true. It finally did apologize, but stubbornly tried to deflect blame for having been duped.

It wrote: “Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them with the aim of making money.”

Hilarious, but pretty pathetic, too. Can you imagine — a Chinese news reporter not doing his own research/reporting, and instead borrowing from sources on the Internet? Who would have believed it? (Heavy sarcasm.)

Link via Andrew Sullivan.

Really odd. They are so beaming with pride, they actually list a lengthy chronology highlighting how the “the US and several Western countries” failed time and again over the past 14 years to get the UN to censure them.

The UN vote, I’m afraid, says nothing about China, but a hell of a lot about the United Nations.

The last time Josh Marshall wrote a long post on Korea, he fell under heavy criticism from the Asian bloggers. Now, it may happen again.

In a new post Marshall asserts that more important than any of today’s big news stories is the victory of the Uri party in the Korean elections. Bottom-line reason: This indicates a worldwide trend of countries choosing to vote in leaders who are against George W. Bush and what he stands for.

It is the continuance of a global trend in which elections in countries allied to the United States are being won by parties advocating loosening ties with America. Running against America — or really against George W. Bush makes for great politics almost everywhere in the world.

We saw it in South Korea two years ago. Then later that year in Germany. Recently in Spain. And now again in Korea — with many other examples along the way.

Each election had its own internal dynamics. But in each case opposition to the policies of the Bush administration became a salient, even defining issue.

He also draws interesting parallels between what’s going on in Korea and recent events in the US. I love Marshall, but his argument does not seem to be particularly sound — there may be other factors behind some of these elections, not simply anti-Bushism at work. Since I don’t know enough about Korea to comment intelligently, I’ll leave it to you to read his remarks and draw your own conclusions. I suspect that once again Marshall will stir up some controversy among the Korean bloggers.