Superblogger Dave Neiwert has a typically exquisite post on what the Minutemen are really all about. The patina of respectability and patriotism racists like Michelle Malkin sought to cast on the neo-fascists is belied by Neiwert’s reporting.

I’ve long held that immigration reform is an important issue that requires serious discussion, but I don’t believe for a moment that scapegoating and harassing border crossers is going to provide any solutions. My experience has been that if you scratch beneath the surface of those who do, you quickly find that they are more likely to be concerned with Latino (or any nonwhite) immigration, not illegal immigration per se, though of course they pay lip service to the latter.

The Stormfront forum is especially enlightening, since it is a specifically neo-Nazi chatroom. Especially noteworthy were the many posts questioning the use of the Nazi symbology at the rally, since it would “turn off” many whites. It’s worth remembering that most dedicated racists take care not to let it show publicly — unlike these fellows. But the whole thread makes clear to what extent these extremists now move among allegedly “mainstream” right-wing operations and not infiltrate them, but fully hijack them.

And as much as they might disguise themselves in the process, the vicious nature of this contingent eventually manifests itself.

Theere’s a lot more in this post about just how ugly and racist the Minutemen are, based on first-person reporting of their orgies of hatred rallies. Not that I ever doubted it; seeing them lionized by the Malkin-Johnson noise machine was a telltale sign.

Good news today from China. A cyberdissident in prison for writing dangerous and harmony-disrupting Internet essays about improving life for the Chinese people has been released after serving a mere three years of his five-year sentence.

Reporters Without Borders today welcomed the release from prison on 5 August of Chen Shaowen, who had written supposedly subversive articles on the Internet about social inequalities, unemployment and the pitfalls of the Chinese legal system.

He had been in jail since 6 August 2002 after being arrested in Lianyuan (Hunan province) and was given a five-year sentence in February 2003, later reduced to three on appeal. The Writers in Prison Committee of the Independent Chinese PEN Center said he was in poor health and had been beaten up by guards in May.

At least 63 cyber-dissidents and Internet users are in prison in China.

When Chen was arrested in 2002, here’s what RSF had to say:

China arrests 31st cyber-dissident

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the arrest of another cyber-dissident in China on charges of subversion and called for his immediate release.

“China has made the simple act of expressing an opinion into an act of subversion,” said Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard in a letter to Chinese public security minister Jia Chunwang protesting against the arrest of the dissident, Chen Shaowen.

“This is not just a violation of the Constitution but also of the country’s international commitments concerning human rights. We remind your government that freedom of expression and opinion is one of these rights. The systematic repression of all critical or discordant voices is very ominous for the future on the eve of a Communist Party congress supposed to launch new leaders,” Ménard said.

Why says there’s no good news coming out of China? Welcome home, Shaowen, and thanks for serving as a model of courage.

That’s the question Martyn takes on over at Horse’s Mouth, where he reveals just how high a price China’s global companies (“national champions,” in CCP jargon) are paying for their much ballyhooed growth. If you are interested in economics and the games some Chinese companies play, it’s a must-read.

Boy, is she ever back! She can drive me crazy sometimes, and I have complained about her oh-so-cutesy snark many a time. But today she’s in fine form.

What the hell, here’s a healthy chunk.

Cindy Sheehan, a 48-year-old Californian with a knack for P.R., says she will camp out in the dusty heat near the ranch until she gets to tell Mr. Bush face to face that he must pull all American troops out of Iraq. Her son, Casey, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in an ambush in Sadr City last year.

The president met with her family two months after Casey’s death. Capturing W.’s awkwardness in traversing the line between somber and joking, and his love of generic labels, Ms. Sheehan said that W. had referred to her as “Mom” throughout the meeting, and given her the sense that he did not know who her son was.

The Bush team tried to discredit “Mom” by pointing reporters to an old article in which she sounded kinder to W. If only her husband were an undercover C.I.A. operative, the Bushies could out him. But even if they send out a squad of Swift Boat Moms for Truth, there will be a countering Falluja Moms for Truth.

It’s amazing that the White House does not have the elementary shrewdness to have Mr. Bush simply walk down the driveway and hear the woman out, or invite her in for a cup of tea. But W., who has spent nearly 20 percent of his presidency at his ranch, is burrowed into his five-week vacation and two-hour daily workouts. He may be in great shape, but Iraq sure isn’t.

It’s hard to think of another president who lived in such meta-insulation. His rigidly controlled environment allows no chance encounters with anyone who disagrees. He never has to defend himself to anyone, and that is cognitively injurious. He’s a populist who never meets people – an ordinary guy who clears brush, and brush is the only thing he talks to. Mr. Bush hails Texas as a place where he can return to his roots. But is he mixing it up there with anyone besides Vulcans, Pioneers and Rangers?

W.’s idea of consolation was to dispatch Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, to talk to Ms. Sheehan, underscoring the inhumane humanitarianism of his foreign policy. Mr. Hadley is just a suit, one of the hard-line Unsweet Neo Cons who helped hype America into this war.

It’s getting harder for the president to hide from the human consequences of his actions and to control human sentiment about the war by pulling a curtain over the 1,835 troops killed in Iraq; the more than 13,000 wounded, many shorn of limbs; and the number of slain Iraqi civilians – perhaps 25,000, or perhaps double or triple that. More people with impeccable credentials are coming forward to serve as a countervailing moral authority to challenge Mr. Bush.

Paul Hackett, a Marine major who served in Iraq and criticized the president on his conduct of the war, narrowly lost last week when he ran for Congress as a Democrat in a Republican stronghold in Cincinnati. Newt Gingrich warned that the race should “serve as a wake-up call to Republicans” about 2006.

Selectively humane, Mr. Bush justified his Iraq war by stressing the 9/11 losses. He emphasized the humanity of the Iraqis who desire freedom when his W.M.D. rationale vaporized.

But his humanitarianism will remain inhumane as long as he fails to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.

And please, don’t attack Dowd on a personal level; I’ve done that enough in the past, when warranted. What about the points she is making about our he-man wartime president? About the sanctity of the lives of our soldiers? (Infinitely more important than that sanctimonious crap about “the “sanctity of marriage,” whatever the F that means). What do you think about swift-boating the mother of a young man slain in Iraq, dying for his country (or so he believed)? Is this the real face of compassionate conservatism? Is this acceptable behavior from our highest leaders?

Isn’t it nice to be free of the cloying chorus of trolls? (Famous last words; let’s hope it stays that way.)

I am up to my eyeballs in planning my trip (I leave for Taiwan in 9 days) and finishing the freelance work that will finance it. So please bear with me as posting is far lighter than usual.

Or so says this Lebanese blogger in this original and most unusual post:

Little says more about al Qaeda being a bunch of little punks obsessed with hitting the big guy (the US and the West) than their lack of adherence to their ideology.

If al Qaeda truly wanted to make the world a better place for Muslims, the US would not be the first country they would attack. Muslims live incredibly free and profitable lives in the United States. And Muslims can be seen thriving in all areas of employment and life as shopkeepers, doctors, artists, and professors.

But in China, this is not the case. Muslims are horribly oppressed by the Chinese government. The Chinese government is officially atheist and has no problem toppling every pillar of Islam. Chinese cuisine is packed with pork, and alcohol is a popular commodity (okay, that’s not really a key point). The Chinese government indirectly supports the genocide of Muslims in Darfur (albeit by other Muslims).

The United States does not stop anyone from expressing their faith. In fact, some American Christians argue that Muslims and other religious minorities receive more religious rights than they do. At elite universities, it is accepted to practice Islam, but it is absolutely unacceptable to profess one’s Christian faith. That’s not the way it is in China.

Yes, I realize the anger stems from America supporting the Saudi regime, Israel, and keeping dictators like Hosni Mubarak in power in the Middle East. But the hate has become entirely irrational. The US took out Saddam Hussein, a man probably responsible for more Muslim deaths than anyone else alive. The US is working (although slowly) to distance itself from Saudi Arabia. The US is pressuring Israel (although very little) to continue with the Gaza pullout. The US is pushing for rightful democracy in Lebanon.

But now al Qaeda is working with entities that do not benefit the Muslim community; they entities that are merely against the United States. The government of Syria massacred over 20,000 Muslims (the number changes depending on who you ask) in Hama in 1982. The Assad regimes mercilessly clamped down on Sunni groups. The Syrian government is an unIslamic government run by Muslim heretics. The Syrian Baath is secularist. And yet al Qaeda and Syria are cooperating to mount attacks in Iraq.

The same goes with Iraqi Baathists. Baath ideology is counter to Islamic movements, and yet al Qaeda operatives are allying with them.

These people are not driven by ideological zeal. They are driven by blind, irrational hate of the US, and they will do anything to take the US down.

If they actually believed their faith and wanted to fight to promote it and help their brethren, China would be a much more suitable target.

Let’s see how far he gets with his “refocus your terrorism on China” campaign. My guess is it’s not going very far. The hatred against the US is too intense, too all consuming, and the terrorists aren’t very open to arguments that run counter to the party line. Too bad we’re so bogged down in Iraq that we can’t give Al Qaedea all the attention they deserve. They are sick monsters, a living breathing threat, and they have chosen their target, the US of A, not the PR of C. That’s not changing.

I’ve been concerned in recent weeks with the deterioration in quality in the open threads. One or two readers were highjacking the threads and using them as entertainment for the entire day, often simply throwing in one bizarre comment after another. Some of these comments were offensive to Chinese readers, and I can’t tolerate that. You can critcize anything you want, but blatant insults aren’t permitted.

I started the threads because we were enjoying so many good conversations and people requested a centralized location for discussion of a variety of issues. They started off great, but lately they have had the exact opposite effect I intended: they were scaring away serious comment and becoming a hangout for a few unhappy people who want to make snide jokes hour after hour. We really don’t need that.

No, I’m not saying I’m censoring the comments. I’m just asking you to please maintain the integrity of the dialogue by engaging with others, and not using the comments as a soapbox for your personal prejudices and animosities. Thank you all.

A very smart Japanese businessman, Joi Ito, looks back at Hiroshima and explains the importance of not looking back. It was Japan’s ability to focus on the future without dwelling on its past misery that allowed its economy and success to be the envy of the world for more than 30 years. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all “victims” could get over the past and strive for greatness in the future? Dwelling on whether something that happened 60 years ago was right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust is such a futile and unhealthy waste.

Not that any of us ever doubted it, but it’s really nice to see it confirmed by those at the top.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush, Kerry charged, “didn’t choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill” the leader of Al Qaeda. The president called his opponent’s allegation “the worst kind of Monday – morning quarterbacking.” Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.

But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora – intelligence operatives had tracked him – and could have been caught.

“He was there,” Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen’s remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. “Bin Laden was never within our grasp.” Berntsen says Franks is “a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was.”

In his book – titled “Jawbreaker” – the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon’s own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen’s lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book’s specifics, saying he’s awaiting CIA clearance.)

That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a “strategic disaster” because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora “was not necessarily just the number of troops.”

While Bernstein praises the CIA’s heroism and their efforts in our so-called war on terror, the conclusions are unmistakable. But hey, we got Saddam Hussein, a doddering tyrant in the twilight of his power. Too bad we inherited an albatross we can’t ever get off our necks. Pity, too, that OBL is free and his empire spreading like a wildfire. Oh well.

I was going to cut and paste this entire post, it is so wonderful, but decided it’s better blog form for me to send you to the poster’s site. Just go there.