links for 2009-07-31
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It helps that they’re not sexy, or attractive, it helps that they’re much more like heroin addicts and that Gregory is using animal blood as methadone. Most of all, it helps that it doesn’t have vampires because vampires are cool, but because vampires are necessary. At least it doesn’t have any pirates.
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His purpose in writing this book is “to reassess Zhou, to denounce Mao, to expose Deng, and to lay bare the myth of official Chinese historiography on party leaders”. Conventional wisdom holds that Deng had a close relationship with Zhou, which might be dated to their work-study days in France in the 1920s. Deng’s rehabilitation and restoration to power in the 1970s was mainly due to Zhou’s effort. Gao challenges this assertion and argues that Deng was Mao’s protégé from the 1930s. Deng’s political rise before the Cultural Revolution was due to Mao’s blessing. Vilified as “China’s second largest Khrushchev,” Deng was purged by Mao at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but was treated much more leniently than Liu, the President of the PRC (1958-1969). Deng’s rehabilitation in early 1973 was Mao’s scheme to counterbalance Zhou’s political influence in the wake of the Lin Biao Affair.... Deng later rose to become China’s paramount leader after Mao’s death.
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Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a great post that needs to be praised... this is just a great, great sentiment.... "But what you have in this debate over self-hating Jews -- remember, there's a report out that Bibi himself has called Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod self-hating Jews -- is the hijacking of Judaism by a group of extremists who have conflated support for the settlement project with love for Israel and the Jewish people."
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Schwarzenegger Approval Sinks to New Low A new PPIC Poll in California shows Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's (R) job approval rating dropped to a new low of 28%. The last time a California governor's approval rating was that low was in 2003 when then-Gov. Gray Davis faced a recall election and was in a budget standoff with the Legislature. A record-low 14% of Californians believe the state is headed in the right direction.
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I'm fully aware of what the Washington conventions are that lead to rampant lawlessness and corruption, and have become aware of media conventions that enable such behavior. I don't criticize standard Washington behavior because -- as Massing put it -- I'm "oblivious" to those conventions. It's that I think those conventions are radically flawed and twisted and ought to be smashed. Dispensing with core Constitutional principles in the name of "practical considerations" -- and treating ludicrous, bad faith claims with respect -- creates a facade of reasonableness. But there's nothing reasonable about it. It's intellectually barren and, worse, is the prime enabler for why our political leaders stray so far and so frequently from those principles
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Weisman: lmy point is, is there a point where you really are soaking the rich, where the carrying capacity of this small group of people has been exceeded and there's just no way you can keep lumping all of the problems of the finances of the United States on 1 percent of those households?
