Paul is shrill again. (That last graf!)

Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 21, 2006

Yesterday The New York Times reported that the Internal Revenue Service would outsource collection of unpaid back taxes to private debt collectors, who would receive a share of the proceeds.

It’s an awful idea. Privatizing tax collection will cost far more than hiring additional I.R.S. agents, raise less revenue and pose obvious risks of abuse. But what’s really amazing is the extent to which this plan is a retreat from modern principles of government. I used to say that conservatives want to take us back to the 1920’s, but the Bush administration seemingly wants to go back to the 16th century.

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What a great read. The only question: Why on earth did it take this long?

For 10 minutes, the talk show host grilled his guests about whether “George Bush’s mental weakness is damaging America’s credibility at home and abroad.” For 10 minutes, the caption across the bottom of the television screen read, “IS BUSH AN ‘IDIOT’?”

But the host was no liberal media elitist. It was Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman turned MSNBC political pundit. And his answer to the captioned question was hardly “no.” While other presidents have been called stupid, Scarborough said: “I think George Bush is in a league by himself. I don’t think he has the intellectual depth as these other people.”

You have to read this mind-blowing article. America’s smartest conservatives are saying they’ve had enough of man-boy Bush. Only the shills at Fox News and the Weekly Standard are keeping their deck chairs on the Titanic. We all have to face it: our president is a miserable failure in every conceivable way, and anyone who wants to defend him does so at their own peril. Ater six painfully frustrating years of raising our voices in protest, the message has finally sunk in. Once the realization is made, there is simply no going back: We elected a moron to be the king of the world, and now each of us has to pay the price, from higher prices at the gas pump to the shame of having to confess you are an American when overseas to seeing our dreams of a great America crack and crumble. Bush is a tragedy and we have to live with him until January 2009. All we can do is work hard at planning for something better, hoping against hope that after he leaves there remains enough of the stuff that made America great to rebuild and recover.

Congratulations, America. You had a choice, and you chose fear over intellect, bravado over critical thinking, and hollow slogans over cautious planning. The result: more terror, more fear, more very rich and very poor people and the deepest social divide in our nation’s history. Once, not so very long ago, we were loved and envied. Now we are universally despised and ridiculed. Let’s all hope that the lessons of this article mark a turning point, at which true believers drop their blinders and confront the ugly reality, painful though it may be. This is all part of the great catharsis America must undergo to void the toxins of the Bush Nightmare from its system. It’ll have to be a colon cleansing on an unprecedented scale, but it has to be done. Kudos to the conservatives like Will and Buckley and Scarborough who had the courage to defy the omerta of the inner sanctum. The fact that they and so many others have all done this tells us something is very rotten in Denmark and America has had enough. Enough.

The election is only 80 days away. Barring a miracle (and Karl Rove is great at producing miracles), it should mark the end of the Bush free for all and a return to more reasonable times, when a president had to back up what he said with facts, and when the checks and balances that made America great could do their work as envisaged by the Founding Fathers, separating America’s rulers from royalty and demanding their full accountability. It looks like we are heading there now, finally, but the worst mistake would be to get cavalier and consider it a done deal. One thing the Bushies do not do is go gentle into that good night. The good fight is now raging, and we can’t let our eye drift from the end goal for even an instant. This is the home stretch, and Americans with short memories need to be reminded of George’s shortcomings and foibles and fuck-ups again and again, at the highest decibel levels. I’m going to do my part, as I hope each of you will as well. Silence equals death. Complacency equals more of the same. No more. Never again.

..of the scariest social experiment of all time. This is an amazing article for those with the fortitude to suffer through the whole thing.

Oh boy.

China’s non-communist parties have vowed to improve their competence in political participation and raise theoretical level by strenuously studying the Selected Works of Jiang Zemin, former chief of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

The country’s non-communist parties have organized group studies, symposiums and lectures on Jiang’s Selected Works since it was published last week.

They also studied the speech made by Hu Jintao, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, at a meeting on the study of Jiang’s works.

Leaders of the Association for Promoting Democracy, the Chinese Peasants and Workers Democratic Party and other non-communist parties said the parties, as CPC’s close friends, will organize further studies of Jiang’s works among their party members.

They said the publication of Jiang’s Selected Works, which have summarized the valuable experience of the CPC in pushing forward socialism with Chinese characteristics, marked a major event in the political life of the CPC and the state.

They noted the works have combined the basic principles of Marxism with the actual conditions in China’s contemporary socialistic construction.

Somebody please straighten this out for me: Are these actual “political parties” and if so, why are they all such “close friends” with the CCP? Has the world been in error all these years, seeing the PRC as a one-party system?

Note the use of the neutral “they” in describing how these various groups look upon Jiang’s momentous works, all of them thinking and saying the same thing in adherence to the strict regulations of Groupthink. Remarkable.

Anyone with information on elections that these separate parties have won recently is free to tell us about them in the comments. And if anyone believes that there is even a single iota of truth in this article, even in its punctuation, let me know why.

I saw this being discussed in the forum recently and I see it’s becoming a big story.

Most of the engineering students in China are not qualified to practice the profession upon graduation, a newspaper reported Friday.

Educators from China and abroad cited a lack of quality education and professionals working in the field as the source of the problem in the country with 8 million engineering students, the largest number in the world, the Shanghai Daily said.

As a result, only 14 percent of engineering graduates become qualified engineers, and most graduates give up engineering and take up other careers within nine years of graduating, according to research conducted by East China University of Science and Technology and presented at an engineering-education symposium at the Shanghai institution known for its technology programs.

“An increasing number of employers began to raise the embarrassing question that engineering majors lack professional knowledge and have poor communication or teamwork skills,” said Tu Shandong, the university’s vice president.

Such a low percentage of graduates going on to practice the profession shows that their education suffered in both content and methodology, said He Renlong, director of the university’s higher research institute.

I know from my years in Silicon Valley that, for whatever reasons, a hugely lopsided percentage of the engineers there are Chinese (or at least that was the case back in the mid/late-90s) who got their PhD’s in America. So it’s not the students themselves; something is seriously amiss with the way China’s universities are educating its engineers and until they start to get serious about it, China is still going to rely on Taiwanese, Hong Kong and other expat middle managers to keep the economic miracle moving.

Interesting to see one of America’s super-pundits take on a topic that most Americans don’t even know exists. To do so in the Sunday Washington Post is even more surprising.

Young soldiers leaving Japan during that war often would say, “If I don’t come home, I’ll see you at Yasukuni.” The souls of 2.5 million casualties of Japan’s wars are believed to be present at that shrine. In 1978, 14 other souls were enshrined there — those of 14 major war criminals.

Between that enshrinement and 1984, three prime ministers visited Yasukuni 20 times without eliciting protests from China. But both of Japan’s most important East Asian neighbors, China and South Korea, now have national identities partly derived from their experience as victims of Japan’s 1910-45 militarism. To a significant extent, such national identities are political choices .

Leftist ideology causes South Korea’s regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA. The choice by China’s regime is more interesting. Marxism is bankrupt and causes cognitive dissonance as China pursues economic growth by markedly un-Marxist means. So China’s regime, needing a new source of legitimacy, seeks it in memories of resistance to Japanese imperialism.

Actually, most of China’s resistance was by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, Mao’s enemies. And Mao, to whom there is a sort of secular shrine in Beijing, killed millions more Chinese than even Japan’s brutal occupiers did.

Junichiro Koizumi, Japan’s prime minister, made a campaign promise to visit the shrine regularly, and has done so, most recently last Tuesday, the anniversary of the end of World War II. Shinzo Abe, a nationalist who is almost certain to replace Koizumi, who is retiring next month, seems inclined to continue something like Koizumi’s policy, and for at least one of Koizumi’s reasons: China should not dictate the actions of Japan’s prime ministers.

He goes on to condemn the infamous museum but notes that Koizumi and Abe never visit it, and he let’s them off the hook with the observation that it’s possible to pay tribute to those who died in a war without paying tribute to the cause for which they died. Still, he recommends that Abe stop visiting the shrine altogether,using as an excuse the fact that Hirohito stopped his own visits there after learning of the war criminals whose remains are hosted there.

I love his observattion that China “decided to be incensed about Koizumi’s visits,” dragging Chinese-Japanese relations to a new low.

Yes, I’m cutting back on these, but this one’s special.

Five Years After 9/11, Fear Finally Strikes Out
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 20, 2006

THE results are in for the White House’s latest effort to exploit terrorism for political gain: the era of Americans’ fearing fear itself is over.

In each poll released since the foiling of the trans-Atlantic terror plot – Gallup, Newsweek, CBS, Zogby, Pew – George W. Bush’s approval rating remains stuck in the 30s, just as it has been with little letup in the year since Katrina stripped the last remaining fig leaf of credibility from his presidency. While the new Middle East promised by Condi Rice remains a delusion, the death rattle of the domestic political order we’ve lived with since 9/11 can be found everywhere: in Americans’ unhysterical reaction to the terror plot, in politicians’ and pundits’ hysterical overreaction to Joe Lieberman’s defeat in Connecticut, even in the ho-hum box-office reaction to Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

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Unbelievable. When it comes to Gitmo, we are no better than China or Uzbekistan in the way we treat our prisoners. The only soltion: a new government dedicated to challenging and investigating the sins of the Bush administration.

Just read the whole thing. I’ve said all I can on this topic.

Now that would be big news. And I wouldn’t put it past them – they’ve shown extrarodinary ingenuity in coming up with treatments for malaria and other diseases.

China’s Ministry of Science and Technology has announced it has discovered a viable AIDS vaccine.

China’s state-run television made the announcement Friday and broadcast a news conference with members of the science ministry.

Forty-nine healthy people received the vaccine and showed no serious reactions, according to Chinese researchers. The recipients appeared to be immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection.

These results are from the first phase of the clinical trial. Researchers will continue with second and third trial phases.

This will certainly be one to watch carefully.