There’s a story ripping through the blogosphere today (fueled by the noxious Michelle Malkin) about a woman’s awful plight whilst on a NWA flight. Insty and Lileks and all the usual suspects are abuzz over what appears to be a very slender and somewhat silly story that underscores yet again our hysteria over “terrorism,” real or perceived. Yes, we need to be concerned and vigilant and cautious. But hysteria is stupid — and dangerous.

Anyway, World O’Crap does a marvelous job fisking the crap out of this non-story. Here’s her conclusion.

So, to summarize: a woman and her hubby are scared because they see a group of Arabic men exchanging glances, and making frequent trips to the rest room. There are air marshals on board. The plane lands safely. The men are questioned, everything checks out, and the men are released — they were merely musicians. BUT there was a report in the press saying that terrorists can assemble bombs in restrooms during a flight, and NOBODY DID ANYTHING ABOUT KEEPING THOSE ARABS FROM USING THE TOILET! She talks to federal officials, who tell her confidential stuff about their policies and procedures for handling terrorists, and give her information about the Arabs’ upcoming flight plans. Thus, we should all be really, really scared, and violate the civil liberties of swarthy men, or just go ahead and start the internment camps. Just in case.

Be sure to read the entire post before you get sucked into the hype and the BS of the original non-story. Very, very funny and sharp as a stiletto.

Oh, and don’t miss all the hysterical, racist comments to Michelle’s post.

Vodkapundit says he may change his earlier opinion that China won’t attack Taiwan. This is the article that’s making him nervous:

The tone of Beijing’s rhetoric has changed, notes Richard Baum, a leading China specialist at the University of California in Los Angeles. The decibel-level of harsh anti-Chen polemic has subsided, replaced by a mood of “grim determination”, Baum said in a Yale Review article. “Before a tiger attacks, it remains calm and quiet,” one Chinese scholar told Baum.

Numerous US analysts believe that China’s military is close to reaching the capability it sees as necessary for an attack om special forces in Taiwan before the US Navy could execute its 30-day “surge” of massive reinforcements to the region – a Chinese version of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe”.

The decisive moment could come even as early as Taiwan’s elections for its legislature this December, when Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party is expected to sweep out many of the conservative Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist) oppositionists who have so far protected the existing constitution that sees Taiwan as part of China.

In another story, the occasionally reliable Washington Times reports China has developed a new type of submarine that’s diesel-powered and ideal for attacking Taiwan.

The new boat, which appears to be a combination of indigenous Chinese hardware and Russian weapons, suggests that China is building up its submarine forces in preparation for a conflict over Taiwan, defense analysts say.

The Washington Times is owned by Commie-hating Reverend Moon, and this entire article is a thinly veiled plea to the US to sell diesel-powered subs to Taiwan. It quotes Richard Fisher throughout, a Heritage Foundation/Jamestown Foundation expert on weapons who is always warning about the military threat posed by China. He may be right this time, and it’s an interesting read, if not a little scary.

I guess it’s time we just accept it: Iraq’s not going to be a democracy as we know it (or anything even close) anytime soon. This is wild, and makes me wonder whether Allawi’s going to be much better than Saddam Hussein.

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners – handcuffed and blindfolded – were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city’s south-western suburbs.

They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they “deserved worse than death”.

The Prime Minister’s office has denied the entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement to the Herald, saying Dr Allawi had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun.

But the informants told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the Prime Minister’s personal security team watched in stunned silence.

Iraq’s Interior Minister, Falah al-Naqib, is said to have looked on and congratulated him when the job was done. Mr al-Naqib’s office has issued a verbal denial….

One of the witnesses claimed that before killing the prisoners Dr Allawi had told those around him that he wanted to send a clear message to the police on how to deal with insurgents.

Maybe the whole thing’s a hoax, so I’ll reserve final judgement. But there’s enough detail to the witnesses’ story to make me inclined to believe them. And it sounds consistent with the way justice has traditionally been administered in Iraq. The more things change….

Via Kevin Drum.

Today I received writing assignments from three separate companies, so I can’t imagine finding any time to post. Tomorrow will be kind of hectic as well, but hopefully I’ll be able to swing back into action. Meanwhile, go read about how, as one of my fellow bloggers insists, there’s no censorship to speak of in China.

As the article says, China’s much-publicized vows of greater assistance to AIDS victims often fail to mean anything in real life.

Chinese police have detained four HIV infected villagers in the AIDS-ravaged province of Henan after they tried to draw the attention of higher authorities to their plight, an activist said on Wednesday.

Beijing has pledged in recent months to give more treatment and help to afflicted citizens and their families, but these promises often ring hollow on the ground. Many people are still deprived of medicine and schooling.

Two of those detained, husband Wang Guofeng and wife Li Suzhi, were rounded up by police on Monday as they were making their way to the railway station in Shangqiu city to catch a train to Beijing, AIDS activist Li Dan told Reuters.

“They were planning to travel to Beijing to petition the health department. They are very unhappy that the promises that Beijing made were never kept,” Li said.

“They are angry at how their childrens’ school was shut and how they have not been given all the help that has been promised to them,” Li said by telephone from Beijing.

Last week, authorities in Shangqiu city shut the Orchid School that Li managed after he told them that he was going to Bangkok to join other activists in rallies and protests at the 15th International AIDS Conference in the Thai capital.

Li started the school late last year for children who were orphaned by AIDS or who had parents suffering from the disease.

Pardon me? Shut down his school because he was going to a conference? What’s going on?

The two others were arrested at a hospital where they were hoping to petition Hu Jintao, who they thought was visiting. Wang’s daughter tried to call the local police, but they claimed to have no knowledge of the case. Right.

Henan province, the original breeding ground for the Chinese AIDS epidemic thanks to its infamous blood-selling scandal, has quite a history when it comes to treating its AIDS victims like animals. This and past horror stories can be attributed to the local Communist authorities, though it would be reassuring to see those at the top intervene, even a little bit, to demonstrate that their promises to AIDS victims mean something. I’m not counting on it, as they’ve got more important things to do, like deciding what books to ban and which mobile phone text messages to censor.

(And yes, I know they do a lot more than that. But why can’t they put their money where their mouth is when it comes to a problem of this magnitude?)

A new milestone for boy george, and a sign of profound desperation:

Opponents of John Kerry have hired a Dallas-area private investigator to gather information aimed at discrediting his military service, say several veterans who served with the Massachusetts Democrat in Vietnam.

Several veterans who have been contacted in recent days accused the private investigator, Tom Rupprath of Rockwall, of twisting their words to produce misleading and inaccurate accounts that call into doubt the medals Mr. Kerry received for his service.

“They’re just distorting things,” said Jim Wasser, who served with Mr. Kerry. “They have nothing to go after John Kerry for, so now they’re trying to discredit him.”

Mr. Rupprath was hired by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on the recommendation of Merrie Spaeth, a Dallas public relations executive assisting the anti-Kerry group.

“Read the whole thing” to see just how slimy this is. The tactics the PI is using redefine poilitical sleaze.

By the way, hiring public relations experts to slime one’s enemies is an old dirty trick of the bush family. In order to get Americans all psyched about invading Iraq in the first Gulf War, GHWB hired the PR agency Hill & Knowlton, which had a 15-year-old Iraqi girl named “Nayirah” testify to a stunned Congress on how Saddam’s evil soldiers went through a Kuwaiti hospital and tore hundreds of premature babies off their incubators, killing them. Only problem was, “Nayirah” turned out to be the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the US and the whole things was a lie concocted by H & K. You can read all about it in Kevin Phillips’ American Dynasty.

Update: Interesting — a little research on Merrie Spaeth, PR consultant for the fraudulent “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” shows she managed PR for President Reagan and is a regular donor to the Bush campaign. I have to wonder, is she really working for the Swift Boat clowns (could they possibly afford her fees, which would be in the 6-digit range?), or is the whole thing a big PR spectacle being paid for by Karl Rove? I don’t know, but I’d bet my house that the whole thing was concocted and paid for by Rove and the bush campaign.

The exposee of Fox News is now the No. 1 best-selling DVD at Amazon.com, according to a very interesting site, CableNewser. I’m ordering my copy today.

Anyone interested in the slimy machinations over at Fox shouldmust check out CableNewser today. What a great site.

We all know the story of today’s fiasco and how dumb the Santorum faction of the Republican Party looks right now. Oh, and President Bush, too. The collapse of the Federal Marriage Amendment is a huge victory for the Democrats, and for all of us.

I have to quote the best-read gay blogger on this:

All I can say is that, from one perspective, that of the gay community, president Bush has done what no Democratic candidate has been able to do for a couple of decades: he has united the entire community around the Democrats. The effort by many of us to persuade gay voters to consider the Republicans, to give Bush a chance, has been rendered almost comically moot this fall. Bush won a quarter of gay votes in 2000. I wonder if he’ll even get a tenth of them this year. He deserves fewer.

It was Sullivan who used the small “p” in “president Bush,” and I’m betting it was intentional. How can we hold any respect for a leader who, in a time of war and crisis, divides and distracts the entire nation over the most cynical legislation introduced in our lifetime?

For anyone who wants to praise bush for his judgement, his leadership, his compassion or his sincerity, I urge you to remember this moment. Remember how he tried to scribble discriminatory grafitti into the Constitution of the United States in a shameless effort to woo right-wing Christian voters. Remeber the cynicism, the cruelty and the deviousness of the whole thing. Remember how it was timed to embarrass Kerry and Edwards. And remember how even bush’s own party rejected it.

Remember how the real leader, John McCain told Congress, “The constitutional amendment we are debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed, and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them.”

And remember how scumbag Santorum, in the face of defeat, vowed to continue fighting: “Isn’t that the ultimate homeland security? To defend the sanctity of marriage?” In other words, gay marriage is to be compared to terrorism. May this whole fiasco come crashing down on Santorum’s head.

Remember that bush is singling out “values” as the key differentiator between him and Kerry. And remember that today we saw bush’s “values” in all their glory. In other words, he has no values and will do anything at all, even endorse the nation’s first and only discriminatory amendment to the Constitution, to get ahead in the election and retain his grasp on power. This is bush, a valueless shell of a man and a menace to us and to the world. Remember.

The past few week’s have seen, for whatever reasons, a huge number of stories on AIDS in India, Africa and China. This article in today’s Financial Times is the only one I saw that offers a new/different perspective on the situation.

For the experts mapping the course of the disease in Asia, the region will not face an explosion in infections but has a series of slow- burning epidemics that could eventually impose huge social and economic burdens.

“We have done a little too much scaremongering, rather than giving Asian leaders a realistic assessment of what is happening,” said Tim Brown, an epidemiologist at the East-West Center in Hawaii.

Asian societies’ traditionally tight control over women’s sexual behaviour is likely to help the region to avoid the extent of the epidemics that have ravaged southern Africa, where in some countries nearly one in three adults are infected.

[….]

Despite public rhetoric about traditional morality, few restrictions are imposed on Asian men’s sexual behaviour. Many visit prostitutes both before and after marriage, and are one of the main drivers and at-risk groups of the region’s Aids epidemic.

Interesting idea, that China’s strict family values could stem the tide of the disease, and there is a lot to say for it. However, since injection drug use, blood donation and prostitution are such major contributors to the epidemic, I have to remain skeptical. When people are poor and hungry and desperate, family values have a way of falling to the back burner.

If the topic interests you, you should have a look at the article, which is the first I’ve seen to say the problem of AIDS in China may have been exaggerated and may not be so urgent after all. It’s certainly not entirely optimistic, especially in light of new challenges posed by China’s ongoing sexual liberation. But its tone is certainly more upbeat (or at least less hysterical) than most articles on the subject.

During my last visit to China I was lucky enough to have dinner with my friend Joseph Bosco, who told me there was one book I needed to read to understand what George Bush and his unfortunate presidency were all about, and that is American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush by Kevin Phillips.

I’ll try not to bore everyone with a detailed book review, as there are already some excellent ones out there (this one being my favorite). But I want to urge everyone who thinks they understand who our president is to get a copy. Everyone.

It’s important to know that Phillips is in no way a leftie or conspiracy nut. He’s a famous and well respected political analyst, more associated with the GOP than the Dems, and a former strategist to Richard Nixon. His brilliance was proven 30-some years ago when he presciently wrote that dramatic new political lines were about to be drawn across the American landscape based on the South’s imminent abandonment of the Democrats, and that religion would play a key role in determining those lines. Give the man a gold star for that one. According to friends familiar with his other books, Phillips has since been right on just about everything he writes about.

The premise of American Dynasty is simple and scary: That George W. Bush’s rise to power was the first true example of a full-blown dynastic restoration in American politics, comparable to the restoration of Louis XVI after the fall of Napoleon — and that dynasties were precisely what the Founding Fathers wanted to avoid in America. As with every restoration, you saw not only the staff of the earlier regime brought back to center stage (Colin Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld et. al), but also all of the family’s gripes: the lust for vengeance against “family enemies” like Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, for example.

We all know the story of Bush’s “victory,” but Phillips makes it clear how in every way this was no ordinary ascent to power. According to American political tradition, a candidate who “wins” with such a small margin (a negative margin, actually) shows some humility and recognizes the public didn’t elect him with a strong mandate. Bush thoroughly ignored this tradition and began to run the nation as though he won by a landslide, pushing for immense tax cuts at once, as well as “moral reform” (stem cell research, abortion, prostitution, etc.).

This was an early warning that this presidency was, in every way, an anomaly.

Other revelations. It isn’t possible to understand Bush –Jr. or Sr. — without understanding Texas, and its cut-throat, laissez-faire, pro-corporate mentality. Phillips opened my eyes about Texas, where the little guy counts for nothing, and the state loathes spending money on its citizens. Altruism is actually a symptom of weakness, and “compassionate conservatism” is in reality a smokescreen, a way of saying, Pay for it yourself.

There’s so much in this book. Just a few more revelations: The huge role that Enron played in the Bush governorship and presidency and the myth that Bush handled the company fairly and without prejudice upon its collapse. Why the family’s hatred of Fidel Castro is deeply personal and goes back generations. What the Carlyle Group is really about, the role Bush Sr. plays in it, and the implications of a former president lobbying his son, the current president, on behalf of a company heavily invested in weapons companies and to a large extent in the pocket of the Saudis. Many of Bush’s colleagues, like Richard Perle, got very rich counselling him on a war in which they were heavily invested, via Carlyle and other munitions investments. The sheer disregard for ethical considerations or even the pretence of fairness is without precedent.

Hubris and lack of accountability are also key themes.

Increasingly aware of the disconnect between compassionate rhetoric and real-world action or funding, portions of the press corp took particular issue with Bush’s 2003 State of the Union and budget messages, employing descriptions that ranged from “gulf of credibility” and “artful misdirection” to “surreal” and “bold-faced lie.” David Broder, columnist for the Washington Post, marveled at the administration’s commitment to $726 billion worth of upper-bracket-tilted tax cuts over ten years in the face of the education, mental health, scholarship and law-enforcement cuts taking shape as states prepared to deal with an estimated $80 billion revenue shortfall for the 2004 fiscal year. He concluded that “this nonchalance — the brush-off to nitpicking questions about the massive debt being handed down to our children and grandchildren — is what makes the atmosphere in Washington so mind-boggling these says.”

Mind boggling, yes. But utterly in keeping with the Texan mentality and the Bush tradition of placing loyalty to corporate wealth above all else. Here’s how Phillips ends his masterpiece:

Since the events and upheavals of 2000-2001, the United States has had an abundance of unfolding transformations to discuss — in economics, national security and even religion. Of these, many can be considered and managed separately. But one is pervasive enough to make its impact felt almost everywhere: the extent to which a national governance has, at least temporarily, moved away from the proven tradition of a leader chosen democratically, by a majority or plurality of the electorate, to the succession of a dynastic heir whose unfortunate inheritance is priviliged, covert, and globally engineering.”

I think it’s pretty clear where Phillips stands on the GWB presidency.

The book isn’t perfect, and it has one big problem: It’s hard to read. Not that Phillips isn’t a great writer, but he’s giving so much information, it’s hard to keep track of it all. No matter; it’s a book you can never forget, and it sure puts the whole House of Bush into perspective. If you have to choose between Fahrenheit 9/11 and American Dynasty, definitely go for the latter (though both are recommended). They are world’s apart and, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, Michael Moore is no Kevin Phillips.

If you managed to make it this far, allow me to end with a few lines from the aforementioned review by Jonathan Yardley.

It is a gloomy, even frightening picture: “global oil ventures, national security, sophisticated investments, arms deals, the Skull and Bones chic of covert operations, and committed support of established business interests,” now compounded by the “religious impulses and motivations” that the born-again George W. brings to the mix. It operates not in the free market its rhetoric prattles about, but in “crony capitalism” that gives every advantage to the cronies with enough capital to buy their way into the game. Crony capitalism has turned the funding of American elections into both a joke and a menace, and has made the public’s business a matter of private interest.

That this powerful argument has been made by Kevin Phillips should be a measure of how seriously it should be taken. He is not an ideologue of the left — to the contrary, he has been identified with the Republican Party for some three decades, though he now calls himself an independent — and he is not a conspiracy theorist; indeed he makes plain at the outset that “we must be cautious here not to transmute commercial relationships into . . . conspiracy theory.” It is true that in some instances his argument rests on circumstantial evidence and in others (mostly involving the family’s engagement with espionage and secret arrangements) on conjecture. It is also true that at times reading his dense prose can be an uphill battle. But American Dynasty is an important, troubling book that should be read everywhere with care, nowhere more so than in this city.

No matter what your politics, this book has a lot to offer, and the breadth and depth of Philips’ knowledge and wisdom are awe-inspiring.

Last comment (I promise): Ugga Bugga has done a masterful job diagramming American Dynasty in a graphic that’s almost as ingenious as the book.