Photo of Yu Zhenhuan

I actually saw this story on CNN this morning. Picture this: Chinese rock musician Yu Zhenhuan is so hirsute, he had to get hair removed from his ears in a surgical procedure in Shanghai because it had reduced his hearing by more than 30 percent.

Doctors said Yu had complained of constant earaches and nausea and had lost one-third of his hearing, Xinhua said.

Yu was recognised in 2002 as the world’s hairiest man by the Guinness Book of World Records, Xinhua said.

Yu’s body, save the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, is covered with an average of 41 hairs per one sq cm, a condition doctors term “atavism”, it said.

The hirsute 26-year-old Yu, a rock-and-roll singer, made his entertainment debut at the age of six in a movie about “a hairy child’s adventure”, the state news agency said.

Definitely news of the weird.

Bush is seen as invulnerable on national security; never mind that his record is a catastrophe — he nonetheless has succeeded in conveying the message that he’s “strong” and “stays the course.” So it’s refreshing to see that Kerry is dramatically closing the once yawning gap between them on this issue.

Democrat John Kerry, whose nominating convention highlighted his war service and focused on national security, has narrowed the gap on President Bush’s strong suit of protecting the country, according to an Associated Press poll that shows the race remains tight….

In the AP survey conducted Tuesday through Thursday, 43 percent said Kerry would do a better job of protecting the country — a gain of 8 percentage points for the Democratic presidential nominee from a similar survey in March.

Kerry improved his standing on the issue with a demographic group that tends to lean Republican: men under age 45.

Bush still has the advantage on the issue, with 52 percent saying the Republican incumbent would do better in protecting the nation. But Bush’s percentage on the issue has dropped 6 percentage points since March, according to the poll conducted for the AP by Ipsos-Public Affairs, and the latest survey was taken as he faced questions about dated intelligence for increased terror alerts

Sweet. The polls aren’t necessarily showing a post-convention bounce for Kerry (how could they, with such a polarized electorate?), but they are showing a dramatic increase in the number of people who now say they believe he is fit to serve as president. This is great news when it comes to swing voters.

bush’s predictable dirty-tricks surprises are duds so far, and if he doesn’t pull off a major miracle over the next 11 weeks he won’t win. Right now, especially with today’s embarrassing jobs report, he’s got precious little to point to in terms of results and achievements.

Check it out — Giblets puts the whole thing in perspective. Snip:

* How many purple hearts did John Kerry really earn, two or three? Giblets speculates: NONE AT ALL! Giblets recalls that while John Kerry was flinging himself in front of Viet Cong machine gun fire and rescuing pregnant villagers, he was also saying quite clearly, “If only these fools knew that I was only risking death so that I could accumulate a supply of medals, throw them away during antiwar protests, and use my injuries to climb the political ladder to become the most despicable tyrant America has ever seen!” It’s true I think I have it on tape somewhere.

* He opposed the war! After cravenly fighting in Vietnam for his country, John Kerry then returned to his country to OPPOSE the war in Vietnam – a war that history has proven to be not only justified, but overwhelmingly popular and morally courageous! We Swift Boat Veterans for Trooth™ stood on the right side of history along with Nixon and Agnew and Kissinger and McNamara! Where did John Kerry stand?

Sometimes good satire drives home the simplest trooths. Thank you, Giblets.

I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now: What happened to Iraq? It’s as though it fell into a black hole. I watch the News Hour on PBS, and they’re showing just as many young soldiers at the end of the show as they were months ago, and often more. (They close each program with photos of the American soldiers recently kiiled in Iraq.) And yet, there seems to be no urgency in the reporting anywhere.

Think back to the weeks after space-suit shrub landed on his Mission Accomplished aircraft carrier. That’s when we first heard the shocking news: one US soldier was being picked off here, another there. It was huge news. It was terrible and urgent and we were all riveted. “Bring ’em on,” shrub challenged, and they took him up on the offer. It kept getting worse until finally it seemed to climax in April, with Najaf and Fallujah. Reports of four or more US soldiers murdered in a single day became commonplace, but they were still appalling. They totally dominated the news, and the nation was obsessed with them — as it should have been.

Najaf died down after we flip-flopped on our promise to get al Sadr dead or alive, and Fallujah went away after we flip-flopped on our promise to restore law and order and bring to justice those who murdered 4 US contractors (we never brought anyone to justice, and we retreated, handing power over to an old Ba’athist strongman). And then we had our hurried, secretive “handover of power,” and with that, media coverage of Iraq seemed to take on a whole new tone.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed this.

A funny thing happened after the United States transferred sovereignty over Iraq. On the ground, things didn’t change, except for the worse.

But as Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect puts it, the cosmetic change in regime had the effect of “Afghanizing” the media coverage of Iraq.

He’s referring to the way news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off sharply after the initial military defeat of the Taliban. A nation we had gone to war to liberate and had promised to secure and rebuild – a promise largely broken – once again became a small, faraway country of which we knew nothing.

Incredibly, the same thing happened to Iraq after June 28. Iraq stories moved to the inside pages of newspapers, and largely off TV screens. Many people got the impression that things had improved. Even journalists were taken in: a number of newspaper stories asserted that the rate of U.S. losses there fell after the handoff. (Actual figures: 42 American soldiers died in June, and 54 in July.)

The trouble with this shift of attention is that if we don’t have a clear picture of what’s actually happening in Iraq, we can’t have a serious discussion of the options that remain for making the best of a very bad situation.

The military reality in Iraq is that there has been no letup in the insurgency, and large parts of the country seem to be effectively under the control of groups hostile to the U.S.-supported government.

Read the whole thing for a very grim reminder of how we are losing this war. Everything bush could have won points on has failed — the truce with al Sadr, the agreement to send Saudi troops to Iraq, Allawi’s announcement of an amnesty (oh, that’s a good one — see Krugman’s final paragraph).

So if you think the recent silence from Iraq is a good thing, if you believe we are “winning” and that everything’s under control, please think again. The situation is worse, not better; it’s just that it’s dropped off the media’s radar screen, supplanted by the elections and the unfortunate complacency that followed the so-called handover.

This is cool; I actually made it onto a list of “seditionists,” along with several other liberal blogs like Pandagon, Atrios and World O’Crap. Not only are we seditionists, but they’re “keeping a close eye” on us, like maybe they’ll come in the night and burn our houses down.

Looking at their mission statement, I tend to think the entire thing may be a prank.

Established in the spring of 2004, The Project for the New American Empire is a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American hegemony over the world by the violent overthrow of Evil. The Project is an initiative of the Hamilton Institute for the Unilateral Projection of Power (666c69); the HAIUPP’s chairman is Demogenes Aristophanes and its president emeritus is Kilroy.

Seriously, the whole thing looks like a joke. I sure hope so.

This is definitely a bombshell. It’s good to see that at least one member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has some integrity left.

Merrie Spaeth, the PR consultant for the group and a former PR person for Ronald Reagan, must be going ballistic. Now they’ll try to say that there’s so much the other members agree on, they couldn’t possibly be making it up. Of course they can; they’re being managed by a master of “staying on message” and they’re being funded by a wealthy Texas Republican who remains anonymous (that came out on Hannity and Colmes last night). Of course they’ll all say the same thing.

Today’s retraction, however, proves that a major contention they make in the ad and in their book is a lie: Kerry did indeed deserve his Silver Star, the retractor now says. I’m sure the Republicans who ordered their copy of the book early will manage to brush this aside, but most of us know better.

Yes, this episode will definitely end up a big net minus for the GOP. Thank you, Ms. Spaeth, and I’d love to know how you sleep at night.

We all know by now about Drudge’s latest hatchet job in which he gives considerable space to the “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” to accuse John Kerry of utterly horrendous crimes and monstrous behavior, from shooting teens to burning villages to torturing animals.

Of course, Drudge lets them tell their whole story, and includes a line or two from the Kerry camp saying the SBVFT are lying.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, even though it makes me sick. Atrios and others have pointed out the nuttiness of the charges, and the fact that all of the men who actually served with Kerry on his swift boat went to Boston to endorse him for president. (The one who didn’t was dead.) And the obvious question arises, were Kerry truly guilty of such heinous crimes and all of these men witnessed them, why were they silent for 30-some years? Is it a coincidence that they are just stepping forward weeks before the election? Yeah, that must be it; a coincidence.

I just saw on the news that bush is distancing himself from the TV ad, and McCain has angrily condemned it. It’s got to remind him of the way Bush smeared him in 2000. This is the ugliest episode of the campaign yet, but it looks like it may well backfire and even cause bush some embarrassment.

Update: Another good link on this story is here.

UPDATE: I just watched a rather remarkable segment of the O’Reilly Factor in which Big Bill himself and smear meister Dick Morris both condemned the ad and said it was a horrible mistake that would create all sorts of problems for bush. Morris said — and I agree — that there’s no way a bunch of disgruntled vets could come up with the cash for their expensive ad without help from a big Republican source, and when this is investigated there may be a Republican scandal. I never thought I’d have praise for O’Reilly, let alone Dick Morris, but it’s due in this instance. That said, I still think they’re both scumbags.

Panicky Annie Jacobsen, the prophetess of doom who lived through the frightening “dry run” in the sky by a bunch of Syrian musicians and lived to tell about it, appears to be officially discredited.

Did, as a passenger reported, 7 of the 13 Syrian musicians whose behavior was terrifying some passengers stand up in unison and take strategic positions by the lavatories and the exit door during final approach to Los Angeles, an act that would have been a frighteningly overt and unambiguous provocation?

They did not, according to the Federal Air Marshal Service, which had previously left unchallenged assertions by Annie Jacobsen, a freelance writer on the flight, that they did.

“What happened was, they were already standing up in the aisle before the seat belt signs became illuminated,” said Dave Adams, a spokesman for the agency, which represents air marshals who travel undercover on airplanes.

“The flight attendants asked them to sit down and the men respected the orders and sat in their seats. Two gentlemen asked why they had to, and a flight attendant told them ‘Because, so please take your seats.’ And they obeyed,” he said.

The new information, he added, came from “subsequent interviews of flight attendants on this matter by our personnel.”

So there was absolutely no sudden move by the men on final approach?

“None,” Mr. Adams said.

Annie is sticking by her story and insists that two other passengers have corroborated it — but she refused to say who they are. Needless to say, I’m extremely skeptical.

As usual, World O’Crap has the best analysis of this, plus many more links debunking Annie’s silly story.

No, I haven’t read it yet, but I know enough about it to wonder whether all of her drum-beating over Annie Jacobsen wasn’t just a way to slyly promote her book.

I’m not going to argue whether or not interning America’s Japanese population on the West Coast was a bad thing or not. I think it was, and another blogger has already taken the time to lay out in extraordinary detail just how weak Malkin’s thesis is. Go there for the facts. Go there to learn who her publisher is.

Meanwhile, another site has done some magnificent photoshopping of Malkin and her bookcover. Don’t wait; if you want a good, thought-provoking laugh, just go there. Here’s one I liked. (Update: I took down the original graphic, for fear it might offend.)

Malkin pitches and defends her book here.

Very exciting news. Finally, some peace of mind and security, and a decent weekly paycheck. Not as good as the dot-com days, but certainly respectable. And it’s the kind of work I enjoy. I won’t dread getting up in the morning and going to work.

Needless to say, the blogging will be sharply decreased, but I certainly won’t give it up. I’ve been going full speed ahead the past several weeks, and that can’t go on forever.

The HR department will be calling me in a few hours to discuss when I’ll start. I’m hoping to take a badly needed vacation before I report for duty. A whole new life….