I won’t get into the argument about China’s “liberation” of Tibet here — I’ve been there before, and it always gets ugly, even worse than trying to talk about Taiwan. But the issue may get a little more awareness soon from a new documentary, Tibet: The Cry of the Snow Lion, that sounds quite intriguing. The voiceovers are done by two of Hollywood’s leading bleeding hearts, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, so you can be sure it tells the story from the Dalai Lama’s perspective, not Mao’s.

Absolutely appalling.

Reporters Without Borders has expressed outrage after two cyberdissidents, Kong Youping and Ning Xianhua, were sentenced respectively to 15 and 12 years in prison by a court in Shenyang in Liaoning province in the north-east of the country.

They were both accused of “subversion of state power” for posting articles on the Internet in support of the Chinese Democratic Party (CDP)….

These sentences are the latest in a long list of repressive measures the Chinese government has taken recently to stifle freedom of _expression on the Internet,” said the international press freedom organisation in reaction to the 16 September 2004 sentences.

But when you look at what these men did, you realize that they probably deserve every year in the hell they’ve been sentenced to:

Kong Youping was arrested in December 2003 for posting five articles and seven poems on a foreign website challenging the official version of the Beijing Spring and criticising corruption among political leaders. He had also called for the release of the young Internet-user Liu Di, who was released in November 2003.

Imagine that. Five articles, seven poems and an appeal to release a young lady who had the temerity to suggest China would fare better under a more democratic system. (She was later released.) If that doesn’t merit 15 years in the Chinese dungeons, what does?

Update: See Stephen Frost’s post from January to see examples of Kong’s dreadfuyl crimes. Amazing.

Interesting. It seems the Pentagon blocks US soldiers in Iraq from accessing Web sites that list US casualties in our glorious war. Why? What are they worried about? Bush says freedom and democracy are spreading like wildfire. What’s a few casualties along the way? (As long as they’re in somebody else’s family.) After all, we all know they’re dying for a great cause, and making all of us safer.

Via Kevin Drum.

Money makes the world go ’round, and right now the fastest and quickest road to make more of it leads to China (or at least that’s what everyone wants to believe).

But of course, China isn’t like those other places where big US companies do business; there’s often a price to be paid for cashing in. (We saw this phenomenon in living color not too long ago when Lucent executives were caught paying bribes to CCP officials. (I can’t condemn that — it simply has to be done and any company setting up shop in China that says they don’t do it, too, is lying.)

Now it’s Symantec’s turn to be in the spotlight. The maker of Norton Utilities and an array of firewall and anti-virus software made a really bad business decision, and CEO John Thompson is going to have some explaining to do.

Symantec has become the latest company to fall afoul of the Chinese ethical minefield. The Cupertino, California-based company found itself in hot water this week: its antivirus software declared a program called Freegate to be a Trojan Horse. In fact, Freegate is a legitimate program that lets Chinese users bypass the government’s Web censorship.

Experts and commentators immediately began to challenge Symantec’s real motives and point out that Freegate does not qualify as malware. Symantec quickly corrected its “mistake”: could it be that the gains from currying favour with the Chinese authorities wouldn’t offset the long-term costs of the publicity backlash at home?

The same article cites Intel’s embarrassment when reporters asked about its courting of Chinese officials. But that’s a far cry from what Symantec did, which was to actively and knowingly aid and abet the Great Firewall of China. That was a very bad decision, and it underscores just how greedy corporations can be when they get those Chinese dollar signs in their eyes.

Graphic stolen from Jesus’ General, one of the greatest blogs ever. Read the post.

I just stumbled onto this; didn’t have time to go through it, but it looks like it may be useful to some of my friends in China.

Not that we didn’t know it already, but it’s good to have it confirmed by the US government.

Along with a recent spike in deadly violence in Iraq, a classified U.S. government report paints a bleak picture of Iraq’s immediate future.

As first reported by the New York Times, the 50-page report, called a National Intelligence Estimate, and prepared by the CIA’s in-house think tank, warns that the worst-case scenario over the next year is that Iraq could collapse into civil war.

Specifically, NBC News has learned that the report says there’s still a danger long-standing rivalries between Sunnis and Shiites could erupt into civil war and that continued attacks on oil pipelines and infrastructure seriously threaten any chance for economic improvement — which is absolutely critical to Iraq’s success.

“The challenge to provide security is a bigger challenge, it seems, each and every day,” says Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

The report also points out shortcomings in the Iraqi government itself — that the lack of experience in representative government is hampering efforts to create an Iraqi democracy and that any long-term political solution free of religious involvement will be difficult.

Ann Coulter says it’s going “magnificently,” and a day doesn’t go by without shrub insisting we’re winning, and spreading freedom and love. It’s as though he’s in a parallel universe. I hope someone tells him about his own government’s report. There is no good news out of iraq, nothing but tragedy and failure. Luckily Kerry is getting this and seizing on it as his chief talking point. Finally.

This is bush’s Achilles Heel, and if October is as awful as September, the voters are going to have to realize it.

Update: Good link on the same general subject — we’re screwed, and all Instapuppy and the warbloggers can post about is kerning.

Update 2: And yet more evidence of just how hopeless the entire mess is. It may not be as bad a war as WWII, but at least in that war we had a strategy.

The News Hour is showing the photos of 8 more US soldiers killed in Iraq this second. One day, not that long from now, we’ll look in amazement, bewilderment and shame at how we sent them to die for nothing except America’s alienation and embarrassment.

Ryan Lizza of the New Republic says it all in a splendid piece describing bush on the stump.

[F]or the most part, spending time on the trail with Bush is like being transported to a parallel universe. The only music is Christian rock and country tunes about plain-talking everymen. The only people who ask the president questions are his most feverish supporters, never the press. In this alternate universe, Iraq and Afghanistan are marching effortlessly toward democracy. The economy is, in the words of former Broncos quarterback John Elway, who introduces Bush in Greenwood Village, “the best in the world.” John Kerry, whose platform is to the right of Clinton’s in 1992, is calling for a massive expansion of government. Meanwhile, Bush’s two most radical ideas, the ones that House Republicans privately insist will top the agenda in Washington next year if Bush wins–a shift toward privatizing Social Security that will cost at least a trillion dollars and a move toward a flat tax–are mentioned only in passing, buried in a laundry list of minor proposals.

And it is all working brilliantly. The key to Bush’s success is that, on the stump, he is a master at turning his simple speaking style into a political virtue. Indeed, if you listen to him carefully, much of Bush’s case for a second term rests on the idea that he speaks more clearly than John Kerry. “Now, when the American president says something, he better mean it,” Bush says at almost every stop. “When the American president says something, he’s got to speak in a way that’s easy for people to understand and mean what he says.” Bush is obsessed with his plainspoken image. If he accidentally uses what he regards as a complicated word, he catches himself and defines it for his audience. “You ask docs what it’s like to practice in a litigious society,” he tells the crowd in Muskegon. “That means there’s a lot of lawsuits. I’m not even a lawyer, and I know the word ‘litigious.'”

….In fact, the genius of Bush’s fetish with speaking clearly and plainly is that it makes it much easier for him to get away with saying things that aren’t true. In the Bush campaign, simplicity is equated with veracity. One of Bush’s favorite rhetorical devices is the straw man. When he speaks of terrorists, he pretends that there is some dangerous faction of Democrats that wants to sign a treaty with Al Qaeda. “You cannot negotiate with these people,” he defiantly tells the Muskegon Republicans. “You cannot hope for the best from them. You cannot hope they’ll change their ways.” Sometimes Bush just assumes that some argument he finds ridiculous has been made.

This is by far the best “on-the-campaign-trail” article I’ve seen this year. Be sure to read it all. I guess the most depressing aspect of Lizza’s anecdotes is how the suckers eat it up and believe the lies and fantasies.

Joseph Kahn analyzes the China story du jour, namely the power struggle between the “reformers” Hu and Wen and the more traditionalist Jiang Zemin. Not much new, but I was intrigue by the article’s opening, which describes Hu’s willingness to embrace democracy and free elections.

The Chinese Communist Party chief, Hu Jintao, said Wednesday that Western-style multiparty democracy was a “blind alley” for China and that the one-party state would fight “power abuse and corruption” by policing itself better.

In a nationally televised address ahead of a high-level party meeting that opens on Thursday, Mr. Hu laid the groundwork for what some analysts say may be modest experiments with checks and balances and elections inside the party. But the speech also showed Mr. Hu’s reluctance to embrace broad changes to address official graft and the misuse of authority, which have fueled widespread popular discontent that some officials say is weakening their hold on power.

“History indicates that indiscriminately copying Western political systems is a blind alley for China,” Mr. Hu, who is also China’s president, said at a ceremony observing the 50th anniversary of the party-controlled legislature.

While Hu tossed some populist rhetoric into his speech, he stressed the necessity of obedience to the Party leadership. He may be truly sincere when he speaks of taking the opinion of the people into account when promoting Party officials. Let’s see if it happens.

Hu pointed to the failure of “China’s bourgeois republic system” under Sun Yat Sen’s some 60 years ago as proof that China is not suited to democracy. I don’t know about you, but it sure sounds to me like an excuse to maintain the authoritarian status quo.

Oh, and as proof of how things have improved, some 36,000 pro-democracy types have been arrested by the CCP prior to the big rubber-stamp Congress. I know, Hu has shown signs of being a reformer, and Wen even more so. But to date, there’s not much to point to. Maybe with Jiang defanged sometime soon they’ll be able to make real progress. I honestly hope so and will give them the benefit of the doubt.

This is a good one. Non-hyperbolic and precise.

I used to really admire Glenn as a thoughtful, balanced libertarian, one I frequently disagreed with but who stuck to a moral code and was generally fair.

No more. I was amazed when I browsed recently to see the links to WorldNetDaily and other “sources” that he just has to know are sensationalist and mediocre. And look at his postings this week — somehow, that distant little country known as “Iraq” appears to have evaporated from his consciousness altogether. Amazing, now that it’s clear we’ve lost Glenn isn’t posting all those pictures of grinning Marines and loving Iraqi children in front of Halliburton-built schools.