I’m back, and I’m late with this, but I want it here for the record. Yes, Bush is this God-awful. The thought of 2.5 more years of this nightmare is literally sickening. Read every word. Right now.

Stuck With Bush
By BOB HERBERT
Published: April 27, 2006

If George W. Bush could have been removed from office for being a bad president, he would have been sent back to his ranch a long time ago.

If incompetence were a criminal offense, he’d be behind bars.

But that’s just daydreaming. The reality is that there are more than two and a half years left in the long dark night of the Bush presidency — nearly as long as the entire time John Kennedy was in office.

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The Republicans might still win the 2006 elections. Never misunderestimate the steamroller power of the great GOP Wurlitzer. It’s a juggernaut, and next to it the Democrats look and sound like impotent, helpless amateurs. Never misunderestimate the power of really good propaganda, the one thing the Bush administration does with finesse, even perfection. I have no choice but to admire it, the same way you have to admire the efficiency of the hydrogen bomb.

This was a quick airport post. No more today.

I travel to Kaohsiung shortly and won’t be posting for a day or so. Meanwhile, lots of fun stuff is happening in the forum. I’m ready to abandon the open thread since the forum makes it irrelevant, but you can always consider the top post as a dumping ground for the extraneous comment.

UPDATE: Problem has been corrected – please see the comments.

We’ve all seen it: those Chinese coffee shops with signs and logos that are barely concealed ripoffs from Starbucks. The Chinese search engines that look eerily like Google. Well, this one is right up there, with a Beijing law firm shamelessly ripping off the design of another law firm’s blog. Common paractice, you say? Sure, but the Beijing firm, Lehman, Lee and Xu, might not have realized that a member of the US law firm they violated is the proprietor of the China Law Blog, and he’s not going gentle into that good night. The name of the offending site is Blawg of China and the law firm’s name is Lehman, Lee and Xu. Googlebomb, anyone? (All of those links take you back to the original China Law Blog post, where you can find the actual links to the offending company.)

Please spread the word.

Could China adopt stringent environmental polices as California has? Well, maybe, yes, at least on paper. But who would enforce these policies? When everyone’s on the take, every rule can be broken.

Go West, Old Men
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: April 26, 2006

As any loyal N.F.L. fan knows, there is something called the “West Coast offense” — a freewheeling style of play invented by Coach Bill Walsh. Watching the recent visit of China’s president, Hu Jintao, left me wondering if America wouldn’t benefit from a “West Coast foreign policy.”

It was surely no accident that President Hu made his first stop in the U.S. in Washington State — not Washington, D.C. — to dine with Bill Gates, who gave him the “state dinner” that the Bush White House refused to extend. Why the Bush team was unwilling to host the Chinese president for a state dinner is beyond me. If I owed someone $1 trillion, I’d give him a state dinner. I’d also give him breakfast, lunch and Chinese takeout.

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So, to those of you who’ve lived in China for ages, can you verify the following:

Beijing – Bra producers have been forced to offer bigger cup-sizes in China because improved nutrition is busting all previous chest measurement records.

“It’s so different from the past when most young women would wear A- or B-cup bras,” Triumph brand salesperson Zhang Jing told the Shanghai Daily from the Landmark Plaza of China’s commercial hub. “You… never expect those thin women to have such nice figures if they are not plastic.”

The report, seen on the daily’s Web site on Tuesday, said that the Hong Kong-based lingerie firm Embry Group no longer produces A-cups for larger chest circumferences and has increased production of C-, D- and E-cup bras to meet pressing demand.

The Beijing Institute of Clothing Technology released a report last week saying the average chest circumference of Chinese women has risen by nearly 1cm to 83,53cm since the early 1990s, the daily said.

China is changing, in every conceivable way.

I’ve now received three separate emails asking if I got mad at Bingfeng over our recent spat on the FLG and, in revenge, threw him off my blogroll. No, never. Bingfeng has always been one of my favorite commenters – smart, funny and unafraid to speak his mind, even if he is usually wrong (kidding!). We disagree violently on many issues, but that’s what makes our sparring worth reading. So why did he get bounced from my blogroll? Simple: He has shut his blog down, and I go through my blogroll every few days to weed out sites that have gone dark. I will miss him, and hope he reconsiders.

Nary a single world we were told in the build-up to our illegal war in Iraq was true. Worse, the truth was known and willfully repressed. John Cole’sTim F’s exquisite wrap-up of recent revelations about what the CIA knew and when they knew is absolutely must reading, and you have to keep in mind he was totally pro-war and pro-Bush. This post is the perfect antidote for fools who continue to insist Bush declared war on Iraq in good faith and with the best intelligence available. Rubbish. These people really belong in jail. If we were to apply their insistence back in 1999 that Clinton’s crime – lying about a blowjob – merited impeachment, then by their logic Bush’s crimes would merit the chair. (Of course, I reject their “logic,” and would be satisifed if Bush were sentenced to, oh, I don’t know, maybe 20 to 30 years hard labor.)

Update: Damn, Cole Tim is in fine form today.

Congratulations to Mary McCarthy, this week’s rightwing hate magnet. Whether or not she committed a crime remains to be seen, but you can practically smell the flopsweat as the rightwing blogosphere dances chanting around her burning effigy in an effort to drive away unpleasant visions of a fading party and a presidency sunk beyond repair….

Apparently among other crimes McCarthy gave money to the Democratic party. Score one for the Partisan Activist smear. By the same logic convicted spy Larry Franklin must damn the entire neoconservative circle in which he ran, correct? The Wolfowitzes and Perles who feted Franklin and treated him like a cherished pal must answer for their questionable connections. Hearings, I say, we need hearings! Or not. You see, Larry Franklin was a Republican so what he did was ok, and even if it somehow hurt America it certainly does not say anything bad about Republicans even though he was tightly knit into their leading circle. Just one low-ranking bad apple. It makes no sense to exonerate Franklin’s friends and indict McCarthy’s, but good luck telling that to someone when they have a good simmering hate on.

The foaming-at-the-mouth right wing bloggers kicking her to death in the public square provide a particularly ugly picture of just how desperate the Republicans now are. Cole does say McCarthy probably broke the law and probably should be punished; but the reaction on the right is hypocritical beyond words.

Kind of funny, watching the world’s next great superpower, a land of 1.3 billion people, getting all apoplectic over a cult of 70 million followers or so. Of course, the more apoplectic they get, the better it is for the Wheelers, who thrive on publicity demonstrating the CCP’s irrational rage against them.

China condemned the Falun Gong spiritual group as an “anti-China political group” on Tuesday but spared Washington criticism over a heckler from the movement who disrupted Chinese President Hu Jintao’s White House appearance.

Hu’s visit to Washington last Thursday was choreographed to highlight his statesman status and Beijing’s hopes to subdue trade tensions with the United States. But a follower of Falun Gong — banned as a cult in 1999 — entered the White House grounds as a reporter and yelled at Hu and President George W. Bush as they stood before reporters.

A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Qin Gang, said on Tuesday that China had made representations to Washington about the embarrassing incident. But official Chinese anger was focused on Falun Gong, which staged protests against Hu throughout his four-day U.S. visit.

“This demonstrates once again that Falun Gong is not only a cult but also an anti-China political organization with base political intentions,” Qin told a regular news briefing.

Falun Gong wanted to wreck China-U.S. relations by any means, Qin said, urging Washington to take concrete and effective measures to rein in its “anti-China” activities.

Sorry Mr. Qin, but anti-China activities are legal in the US, as are pro-China activities. I fully agree that the FLG are a big pain and the heckler’s performance at the White House was yet another creepy publicity stunt. But have you ever asked why in the US life goes on as always, even though the Falun Gong are free to do as they choose? In fact, that seems to be the case in every other country except China. As distasteful and yucky as the FLG practitioners are, they now have a presence in several other countries and no one’s gone hysterical over them or seen fit to arrest and torture them. Only China. Now, why is that? Could it stem from the government’s fundamental insecurity in the face of a group that has proven its ability to organize masses of followers at will. Nothing freaks out the CCP more than an ability to gather the masses, which is why all religions and all media and all clubs have to be blessed and overseen (if only indirectly) by the Party. A group that can draw tens of thousands together in almost no time at all without permission from the party – nothing could be more threatening to the party than that. The whole thing says way more about the CCP than it does about the FLG.

Sorry for that long digression. It just sort of wrote itself.

Finally, the nightmare of the registration system is fixed. Let’s see if we can compete with the Duck Pond and maintain an open thread once more.