| Foreigners and Locals in the Crosshairs of Yemen's al-Qaedas Yemeni militants tended to attack foreigners and avoid locals, but foreign jihadists have pushed to target Yemen's U.S.-backed authorities feedproxy.google.com |
Charges over US health care scam US officials charge 73 people, mostly Armenians, over a massive fraud against the country's medical insurance system. bbc.co.uk |
Senate updates from all around | Michael Tomasky We start with Kentucky. The woman who was the victim of the Rand Paul Aqua Buddha prank has spoken to Greg Sargent. She does say the thing was a prank and it being portrayed overly-ominously by the Conway campaign. However, says the woman, now a clinical psychologist:"My whole point in sharing [the episode] was that Randy used to be a different person with different views that have radically changed, and he's not acknowledging that," she told me. "That is why I shared it in the first place."She added that his college years and views should raise questions "as to how genuine he is about his beliefs now. I have a hard time seeing how someone who espouses beliefs that he used to would turn around and become a conservative Christian."She confirmed the ad's accuracy, and wondered aloud why Paul doesn't just admit what occured and move on."Yes, he was in a secret society, yes, he mocked religion, yes, the whole Aqua Buddha thing happened," she said. "There was a different side to him at one time and he's pretending that it never existed. If he would just acknowledge it, it would all go away and it wouldn't matter anymore."I think the truth is that Paul was a devoted Ayn Rand acolyte in college (though he is not named after her). See this Jonathan Chait post on that. Ayn Rand had seething, flesh-burning contempt for all forms of religion. Ed Kilgore wrote in Democracy (the journal I edit):Rand's disdain for religion was as integral to her philosophy as her disdain for anything that remotely smacked of socialism. That's made very clear in what she regarded as the most important writing of her life, Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged: "[T]here are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind." To Rand, those who accepted "enslavement" to God–or for that matter, such conservative totems as family or tradition–had no moral standing to pose as fighters against socialism. A guy who was a devoted Randian in college was very likely not any sort of Christian, but indeed possibly an Aqua Buddhist. I still have no real idea of the political fallout, but now this is close to having three-day legs, and any story with three-day legs hurts a candidate a little.Next up, Delaware. Christine O'Donnell said in this morning's debate that the separation of church and state isn't a constitutional matter:In a debate with Democrat Chris Coons this morning, Delaware's Republican nominee for Senate, Christine O'Donnell, suggested the way she reads the Constitution, there's no ban on the government establishing or influencing organized religion."Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell said, according to the AP. The question came as part of a discussion over science education in public schools. O'Donnell "criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons' position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine." She also seemed unclear about what's in the Constitution itself."You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?" she asked, when Coons brought up the fact that the very First Amendment to the Constitution "bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion."Conservatives often say that there's no separation of church and state in the Constitution. Tom DeLay used to say it. But it seems here that O'Donnell may have, uh, forgotten. Or perhaps it adds weight to my theory that she took those "Oxford" postmodernism classes more to heart than anyone thinks, and she really is a situationist-type pomo philosopher trying to subvert order.Finally, we return to Alaska. This morning in his Playbook email, Mike Allen linked to a headline saying "Prosecutor mulling charges in editor, Miller flap." Oh, that's good, I reflexively thought. Joe Miller's goon squad, or some member of it, is going to be arrested and at least inconvenienced for disorderly conduct or something for "arresting" a journalist asking questions of a candidate for public office at a public forum in a public school. A little piece of sanity.But just before I clicked, I thought, hmmm...and sure enough, the charges being mulled would be filed not against the Miller people, but against the journalist. For trespassing! A local police lieutenant named Parker:Parker said the Miller campaign rented the school at which the event was held and was entitled to decide who was allowed there."If the press is invited, they have every right to be there," he said. "But if they say to a particular member, 'We don't want you here,' then that person is persona non grata and can't stay."What? If you say fine to this, then you must also consider it fine when Obama, at an event at a building we otherwise consider public, kicks out the Fox News correspondent. This is the 8,479th what-country-am-I-living-in-again moment of this campaign.US midterm elections 2010KentuckyDelawareAlaskaMichael Tomaskyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The west must stand up to China | Kapil Komireddi Western liberals who assume they can gradually influence China are wrong – it is an expansionist power without a consciencePity the Chinese. The inhabitants of the world's next superpower cannot search the internet or assemble or travel or speak or read or write or even reproduce without restriction. Yet in the lands where freedom is abundant, China, rather than earning well-deserved rebukes, continues to be championed as the ineluctable future. This disgraceful journey began with a liberal assumption: the west, it was claimed, is more likely to influence China by partnering with it, by giving it a prominent position inside, rather than pushing it outside, global institutions.But in the decades since, far from moulding the Chinese state's behaviour, it is the west that has incrementally given up on its own values in order to appease Beijing. It has been customary since the early 1990s for American presidents to invite the Dalai Lama to Washington. Last year Barack Obama did away even with this minor gesture of solidarity with the Tibetans for fear of offending Beijing. Even the brief private audience Obama eventually granted the beleaguered Tibetan leader was accompanied by humiliation: the Dalai Lama was made to exit the White House through the back doors.Contrary to the claims made by western apologists, China is not a substantially freer country today than it was a decade ago. The tools that have empowered the Chinese people – the internet, for instance – have strengthened the state in equal, perhaps even greater, measure: an ordinary Chinese citizen's ability today to communicate instantly with the outside world is matched by the state's capacity to silence him equally rapidly. Freedoms mean nothing if they are not accompanied by corresponding restrictions on the state's power to check them on a whim. Liu Xiaobo may be celebrated as a hero in the west, but in China he does not even have recourse to an appeal.Liu's plight casts light also on the fundamental uselessness of the so-called "social networking" sites. If Facebook could foment revolutions, Liu's Charter 08 would have attracted many more signatories than the 8,000 it managed. If Twitter could bring down governments, the number of "netizens" detained following Liu's win would not be limited to 20. In 1989, millions of Chinese marched through Beijing and thousands were killed. The symbol of their struggle was the Goddess of Democracy. They did not "tweet".In any event, Beijing, with its empirical success in crushing dissent with extraordinary force, is unlikely to yield to nonviolent calls for substantive reforms, especially when control of the Chinese state today offers significantly richer rewards than it did a decade ago. But the plight of the oppressed has rarely deterred western liberals from exalting the oppressor. Mao's cultural revolution – ignited in response to a play by Beijing's vice-mayor that was considered to be mildly critical of the ageing megalomaniac – dispossessed hundreds of thousands, resulted in as many deaths, and in some rural parts led to cannibalism.But one visiting leftwing British academic at the time (the late Joan Robinson) could not see beyond the romantic "long marches" in which the Chinese "learned more about their own country in a few months than they ever could have learned out of books".This trend continues today. Even a shrewd observer such as Martin Jacques makes the absurd case in his authoritative recent book, When China rules the world, that China's rise is "peaceful". Jacques is driven by sympathy for the non-western world. But his premature exoneration of China as a potentially peaceful power is based on a western-centric reading of the world, because it overlooks the violence Beijing is inflicting on people in the non-western world, either directly or by shielding dictators from international action. China's neighbours expressed their own fears at the Asean summit in Hanoi.And to millions in Darfur and Burma, Xinjiang and Tibet, China's rise is anything but peaceful. Besides, Beijing's early support to the rogue nuclear programme of Pakistan's AQ Khan – who subsequently went on to sell nuclear secrets to bidders in Iran and North Korea, among others – demonstrates China's indifference to global security when it comes to furthering its own interests.Erasing its own history, massacring its own people, shielding genocidal dictatorships abroad, bullying its neighbours, China is an expansionist power without a conscience. There is much that is wrong with the west – and liberal democracies elsewhere – but imagine a world in which China can no longer be held to account. That future is not very far. But if the west continues to cower, it will be here sooner than we think.ChinaHuman rightsUS foreign policyKapil Komireddiguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
China's State-Owned Firms Take Hits on Overseas Projects While the new Chinese-built Mecca Metro went off without a hitch during this year's hajj, it has caused uproar back in Beijing since the state-owned China Railway Construction Corporation revealed that it suffered a $600 million loss on the project feedproxy.google.com |