No, I suspect he isn’t, but this abolutely fabulous site explores the issue and certainly offers some compelling evidence. After all, he’s constantly invoking the other “F” word (“Fabulous!”) Fabulous this, fabulous that. You really gotta wonder. And those hand gestures!

I had my first big laugh of the day when I scrolled down and saw their bumper sticker showing Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell with the headline, “Don’t change horsemen in the middle of an apocalypse!” I’m still laughing. Hard.

I don’t often put jokes on my site, but this one’s a bit above average.

A man died and went to heaven. As he stood in front of Peter at the Pearly Gates, he saw a huge wall of clocks behind him. He asked, “What are all those clocks?” St. Peter answered, “Those are Lie-Clocks. Everyone on earth has a Lie-Clock. Every time you lie the hands on your clock will move.” Oh,” said the man, “Whose clock is that?” That’s Nelson Mandela’s. The hands have never moved, indicating that he never told a lie.” Incredible,” said the man. “And whose clock is that one?” St. Peter responded, “That’s Abraham Lincoln’s clock. The hands have moved twice, telling us that Abe told only two lies in his entire life.” “Where’s Bush’s clock?” asked the man. “Bush’s clock is in Jesus’ office. He’s using it as a ceiling fan.”

The great Woody Guthrie song sung as a duet by George Bush and John Kerry — don’t wait, go right now. You will laugh. Big file, but wait it out. It’s well worth it.

Via Sully.

UPDATE: This link seems to be way faster.

Hilarious. This opinion piece in China Daily is a result of the infamous post by Blackie Lau that I and many others here cited for its unashamed hatred of all things Western and its adoration of all things Mao.

Please, if you dont know the story you have to see my original post that started it all. A few days ago I tried to talk to this fellow Lau Guan Kim about the issues on a message board, but all he would do was rant that my choice of “Peking Duck” for my blog name was a sign of gross Western prejudice and backwardness. (Sorry, but in the US we refer to Kaoya as “Peking Duck” – it’s nothing against China or anything else. Just a play on words. I never heard any complaints about it until today.) It was an illuminating exercise.

Well, I can sit back tonight knowing that many more Chinese readers will know about my blog by the morning. Lau Guan Kim, I am still willing to discuss my post in a reasonable way and go through it line by line to explain why I took my position. I offered to do so yesterday, and you went beserk over my blog name, Peking Duck and ignored my offer. This sort of reaction of mockery and hysteria — well, don’t you think it just proves my point?

It’s definitely about time. The new documentary Outfoxed sounds like revenge at its sweetest.

”Outfoxed” has been made in secret. The film is an obsessively researched expose of the ways in which Fox News, as Greenwald sees it, distorts its coverage to serve the conservative political agenda of its owner, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. It features interviews with former Fox employees, leaked policy memos written by Fox executives and extensive footage from Fox News, which Greenwald is using without the network’s permission. The result is an unwavering argument against Fox News that combines the leftist partisan vigor of a Michael Moore film with the sober tone and delivery of a PBS special. A large portion of the film’s $300,000 budget came in the form of contributions in the range of $80,000 from both MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, the liberal policy organization founded by John Podesta, the former chief of staff for Bill Clinton; Greenwald, who is not looking to earn any money from the project, provided the rest.

A week after its New School premiere, the film will be shown throughout the country in hundreds of small local screenings, arranged by MoveOn, where people will be able to watch and discuss it. Though the existence of ”Outfoxed” has been quietly publicized, its particular nature and content have been closely guarded for fear, Greenwald says, that Fox would try to stop the film’s release by filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit. Nobody has ever made a critical documentary about a media company that uses as much footage without permission as Greenwald has, and the legal precedents governing the ”fair use” of such material, while theoretically strong, are not well established in case law. He has retained the services of several intellectual-property lawyers and experts to help him navigate the ambiguous legal terrain. (A Fox News representative, in response to several phone calls, said that no one in the legal department was available to comment on copyright issues.)

If Greenwald is lucky, Fox will be gun-shy, having earned nothing but public chiding when it brought a trademark lawsuit last year against Al Franken, whose book ”Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” ironically appropriated Fox News’s signature phrase ”fair and balanced.”

This is something I’ve been waiting for, though I’m afraid it’ll only be seen by those already aware of what a fraud Fox News is. I just heard an interview with Greenwald on the radio, and he read off memos sent out to the Fox news announcers each morning telling them what positions to take on issues — they should stress the Dems’ postion on abortion, for example, or talk about how happy the Iraqi people are.

Unprecented is an over-used word but it applies here. The TV news stations may lean one way or another, but they don’t order their reporters to take specific partisan positions on the stories they write, all designed to keep the ruling party in power.

This entire blog could be dedicated to the sins of “the nation’s most-watched news station,” but enough blogs and sites are already doing just that.

I never watched Fox until I came home from Asia, and I watch it nghtly out of a morbid curiosity, a kind of disbelief that such undisguised BS could be watched by so many people. But I do understand the phenomenon; it’s kind of fun, the sheer outrageousness of it, and O’Reilly and Hannity are so despicable you have to wonder if they aren’t parodying themselves, playing a huge joke on all of us. On some days I’ve even kept a tally of how many times the newscasters (especially Brit Hume) and guests repeat certain phrases, like:

John Kerry is the No. 1 most liberal Senator

John Edwards is the No. 4 most liberal Senator

John Kerry has flip-flopped on this issue in the past

Some say the democrats are out of touch with American values

Massachusetts liberal

More liberal than Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton

Some fear that terrorists might attack before election day to ensure a Kerry win

Kerry has no problem with partial-birth abortions

A new victory in the war on terrorism

Things the liberal media don’t want you to know

Proof that Al Qaeda did have a close working relationship with Saddam Hussein

Those are just some of the things they drum into your head, and it’s no small wonder so many listeners believe Saddam was one of the architects of 9/11.

The NYT link comes from Dan Gillmor, who has some interesting comments on the legal challenges Greenwald could be facing with this documentary. He notes that Fox has threatened to come out with its own exposee of “liberal media” if the documentary comes out, which would be completely fair. I just don’t think there’s enough there that could be anywhere near as shocking as what’s going on at Fox.

Update: Here’s thte link for the Outfoxed Web site.

Anyone interested in this topic will want to see the review of a new book, Advertising to Children in China by Kara Chan and James U Mcneal, both academics on things Chinese. A sample:

One of the main points it has to make is that the child occupies a rather special position in the family in China. The reason for this, of course, is the one-child policy, first set in place in 1979. This one child, the authors argue, quickly grows to have far more power over family decisions, including decisions on what to buy, than its equivalent elsewhere. Does it answer to the classic definition of “spoiled brat,” they ask. In many cases the answer in China has to be “Yes.”

But the authors aren’t apparently unduly worried about this. If you’re only allowed to have the one child, then it’s hardly surprising that four adoring grandparents and two adoring parents are going to constitute a powerful pressure-group in the domestic domain. Besides, consumer protection, is a relatively recent development in the West, and a highly sophisticated form of human right in China, considering all the other human rights, acknowledged or denied, it has to compete with.

Nevertheless, there are quite elaborate controls in place governing advertising aimed at children in China. It shouldn’t show affluent kids displaying pride in possessing a product while an impoverished counterpart dressed in rags looks on in envy. It shouldn’t show children indulging in insulting behavior to the family (or, needless to say, the state). And it shouldn’t encourage children to ask their parents to buy the advertised product for them. This last prohibition is surely ambiguous at best. Isn’t what it seems to ban the whole point of such advertising?

The good news, however, is that the older generations in China still distrust advertising in general, and that many of the young are coming to take a similar view.

That doesn’t sound like it bodes too well for advertisers, but I doubt they’re worrying. Advertising in China is booming, probably more than anyplace else, and whether people are skeptical or not, advertising still works there.

I couldn’t believe it as I read this. What on earth are we coming to? Seriously, this is the sort of thing I expect to read about in China — and even they wouldn’t be this preposterous.

Link via Kevin Drum.

We’ve seen it before with Du Daobin and the Stainless Steel Mouse, Liu Di. Now there’s an online petition to free the SARS whistleblower, a national hero in China, and it reportedly already has 400 signatures.

Hundreds of Chinese on the mainland and abroad have added their names to an online petition to free Dr Jiang Yanyong, the doctor who blew the whistle on China’s initial cover-up of the Sars outbreak last year.
‘Everytime they arrest someone, we launch a petition. When will it end?’

He is widely reported to have been detained for writing a letter in March denouncing the Chinese government’s handling of the Tiananmen incident and calling for a review of the crackdown on student demonstrators in 1989.

By yesterday evening, the website had collected more than 400 signatures.

Those who have signed the online petition at the website include academics such as well-known economist Mao Yushi, relatives of those who died during the Tiananmen Square incident, as well as people working or living abroad.

In a letter addressed to Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, the petitioners pleaded for the release of Dr Jiang.

They said: ‘For more than a month, we’ve waited silently for Dr Jiang’s safe return.

‘But we are disappointed and now we want to speak up loudly: Release Dr Jiang unconditionally now!’

If anyone has the link or a copy of the petition please let me know so I can post it here. Thanks.

UPDATE: Petition in Chinese is here.

Here’s what a furious Andrew Sullivan has to say:

“No understanding of the real Constitutional issues involved – just an hysterical screed against “activist” courts. No mention of the fact that 38 states have already banned equality for gays in marriage. No mention of civil unions. And, again, no actual use of the words “gay”, “lesbian” or “homosexual.” This really is a revealing silence. Think what he could have said: let’s keep marriage for heterosexuals, but let’s find a way to protect the relationships of our gay and lesbian fellow-citizens. That would be a “uniter” not a “divider.” But Bush is a tool of the fundamentalist right – a movement that seeks not simply to keep marriage for straights, but to strip gay people of dignity, rights, protections and equality. If he were to call us by name, he would violate the fundamentalists’ belief: that gay people don’t exist, that we’re sick heterosexuals, that we need to be put in therapy or jail.”

“Yesterday, Bush decided to show he was a moderate by arguing that people should be allowed privacy in their own bedrooms (a policy he opposed when supporting Texas’ disgusting gays-only sodomy law as governor). That’s it. That’s what he thinks the place of gay people is in society. We’re lucky not to be arrested in our own homes.”

Can Sully endorse such a man for president, even if he was once his hero? This post is immediately follwed by a letter from one of Sully’s smarter readers.

“Andrew, like all of us you deserve a national party that represents faithfully at least most of your political philosophy. Right now that may not be either major party, but it could be the GOP after it is forced to engage in a real internal debate about its future and direction. In other words, a Kerry-Edwards win in 2004 might force the GOP to decide what it wants to be–the party of Pat Tillman, Rudy Guiliani, John McCain, and Arnold or the party of Rick Santorum and Ralph Reed. Only faced with a loss in November will the GOP have the opportunity to have this dialogue. Imagine how engaged you will be, and how exhilirating that New Hampshire primary will be in 2008?”

“But if Bush wins there is no chance that anyone will stop to ask the hard questions. The contradictions and the fissures will simply be papered over and the Santorums will continue their triumphal march, smug and unchecked. If nothing else, a Kerry-Edwards win in November does two positive things for this country: first, it gives the GOP a chance to pause and make intelligent choices, a chance to improve itself into something that Sullivan and Kaus and Simon might all feel comfortable in. Second, a Kerry-Edwards win puts a roadblock in front of Hillary Rodham Clinton for good. Win win, I say.”

While I don’t agree with all the points the letter writer makes, his premise is sound: It’s time for the GOP to escape the clutches of far-right Christian Fundamentalism that goes counter to all America is really supposed to stand for. The GOP under Bush has polarized this country to the point of sickness and dysfunctionality

I’d say Sullivan’s on the verge of endorsing the Kerry-Edwards ticket, no doubt with deep reservations. But if you look back at the way Sully was chortling and gloating during the heady days of our march into Baghdad, when he was a certified Bush attack dog, this is a dramatic shift, to say the very least.

NEWSFLASH: I just saw the latest Newsweek poll results on CNN. Unlike the earlier AP poll, this one fully reflects Kerry’s selection of Edwards. 51 percent of Americans now favor Kerry-Edwards, while 45 percent go for Bush-Cheney.

No doubt these numbers will bounce around like ping-pong balls, especially if Bush produces Bin Laden. But only a fool would say Bush isn’t in a precarious position as an incumbent president a mere three and a half months before Election Day.

Where’s the outrage? It borders on criminal conspiracy.

Military records that could help establish President Bush’s whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

It said the payroll records of “numerous service members,” including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.

The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush’s claims of service in Alabama are in question….

The loss was announced by the Defense Department’s Office of Freedom of Information and Security Review in letters to The New York Times and other news organizations that for nearly half a year have sought Mr. Bush’s complete service file under the open-records law.

There was no mention of the loss, for example, when White House officials released hundreds of pages of the President’s military records last February in an effort to stem Democratic accusations that he was “AWOL” for a time during his commitment to fly at home in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

How come we let him get away with this? Can anyone read this and conclude Bush doesn’t have something to hide?