Palin arguing with daughter’s ex-fiance: “Liar,” “Self-promoter”
I just don’t see this story as worthy of the Asahi’s status as the 2nd most read newspaper nationwide and the paper of record for the center-left elites. I mean, it’s true that some of Tokyo Governor Ishihara’s more controvertial statements get coverage in Western media, but how in the world does this completely inconsequential Jerry Springer segment matter to any but the readers of Josei Seven, Japan’s equivalent of the National Enquirer?
UPDATE: Well, I guess if the New York Times is sinking to that level, the Asahi was just following suit.
Checking the Brookings Institution’s site on other business, I came across info for this event happening on Friday in downtown DC:
AN ADDRESS BY THE HON. SHINZO ABE, FORMER PRIME MINISTER OF JAPAN
A New Era Requires New Political Will
Event Summary
On April 17, the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at Brookings will host former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan for an address on key issues facing Japan, the United States and the world. Prime Minister Abe will discuss Japan’s role in addressing regional and global security concerns as well as the global economic crisis and climate change. He will also explore possible policy approaches to these and other issues for the Japanese and U.S. governments, as both countries and the international community face an era defined by urgent challenges and new leadership.
I’m sure that it does take “political will” to tackle difficult issues, just not Abe’s uniquely ham-fisted brand of it.
If this is indeed the start of some kind of political comeback, one can only hope that if the LDP stays in power after the next election, Aso will appoint Abe to multiple cabinet portfolios (I envision a right-wing hawk trifecta: foreign minister/NK abductee policy minister/Northern Territories minister).
Since I love to criticize without having any actual responsibility to run things, I will be sure to catch the audio of this when it comes out.
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Check the #0066cc;">Adamukun blog for Adamu’s shared articles and recommended links.
All the world’s a stage, wrote Shakespeare, and in the world of Washington, the curtains have opened on the most elaborate farce of the year. Welcome, taxpayers, to the Kabuki Theater of AIG Outrage — where D.C.’s histrionic enablers of taxpayer-funded corporate bailouts compete for Best Performance of Hypocritical Indignation.
… Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, the corporate crony who is the largest recipient of AIG donations, is now leading the charge to tax the retention payments in order to recoup the $450 million the company is paying to employees in its financial products unit.
But Dodd, it turns out, was for protecting AIG’s bonuses before he was against them.
Fox Business reporter Rich Edson pointed out that during the Senate porkulus negotiations last month, Dodd successfully inserted a teeny-tiny amendment that provided for an “‘exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009,’ which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are seeking to tax.” Pay no attention to what his left hand was doing. Dodd’s right fist is pounding mightily, mightily for the sake of the taxpayers.
…
If Washington’s newfound opponents of rewarding failure want to do taxpayers a favor, how about giving back their automatic pay raises? How about returning all their AIG donations? How about taking back all the bailout money to all the failed enterprises, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to AIG, the automakers and the big banks? Barry? Harry? Nancy? John? Chris? Bueller? Bueller?
The most stringent pay restriction bars any company receiving funds from paying top earners bonuses equal to more than one-third of their total annual compensation. That could severely crimp pay packages at big banks, where top officials commonly get relatively modest salaries but often huge bonuses.
As word spread Friday about the new and retroactive limit — inserted by Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut — so did consternation on Wall Street and in the Obama administration, which opposed it.
Can that be any clearer? It was Obama officials, not Dodd, who demanded that already-vested bonus payments be exempted. And it was Dodd, not Obama officials, who wanted the prohibition applied to all compensation agreements, past and future.
Ironically enough, Malkin’s own eagerness to repeat wingnut talking points is about as staged and scripted as anything on Capitol Hill, not unlike a certain traditional Japanese dramatic form. But I guess since she uses blogging software instead of the Senate floor, no appropriate cliches have arisen to describe the right-wing noise machine.
(Thx to M-Bone for pointing this out)
UPDATE: So Dodd didpush to pay the committed AIG bonuses?
But here in one of the most remote corners of the Andes, the military, in a renewed campaign, is battling a resurgent rebel faction. And the Shining Path, taking a page from Colombia’s rebels, has reinvented itself as an illicit drug enterprise, rebuilding on the profits of Peru’s thriving cocaine trade.
The front lines lie in the drizzle-shrouded jungle of Vizcatán, a 250-square-mile region in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley. The region is Peru’s largest producer of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine.
…
… Coca, the mildly stimulating leaf chewed raw here since before the Spanish conquest, is largely legal; cocaine is not.
Coca, a hallowed symbol of indigenous pride, is ubiquitous here. Qatun Tarpuy, a pro-coca political party, paints images of it on mud huts. Women harvest coca in clearings along the winding dirt road, and children dry the leaves in the sun.
It is also nearly impossible to find a coca farmer here who admits that his crops are sold for anything other than traditional use, but somehow, studies have found, as much as 90 percent of the coca goes to produce cocaine.
In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, coca cultivation in Peru increased by 4 percent, reaching the highest level in a decade, according to the United Nations. At the same time, Peru’s estimated cocaine production rose to a 10-year high of about 290 tons, second only to that of Colombia.
While the Shining Path was involved in coca before, now it is a major focus. According to military and anti-drug analysts, the faction here, while still professing to be a Maoist insurgency at heart, is now in the business of protecting drug smugglers, extorting taxes from farmers and operating its own cocaine laboratories.
…
Coca farmers here describe today’s Maoists as a disciplined, well-armed force, entering villages in groups of 20 in crisp black uniforms. Little is known about their leaders, aside from the belief that two brothers, Victor Quispe Palomino, known as José, and Jorge Quispe Palomino, alias Raúl, are at the helm.
Soldiers speak respectfully of the rebels’ command of the jungle terrain and of their ability to harass with gunfire more than a dozen forward operating bases that have been established in recent months. “Their columns seem to melt into the jungle,” said Maj. Julio Delgado, an officer at a base in Pichari, one of the largest towns in the valley.
…
The rebels contend that they no longer assassinate local officials or sow terror with tactics like planting bombs on donkeys in crowded markets, atrocities the group was infamous for in the 1980s. This metamorphosis was confirmed by testimony from villagers who had come in contact with them, interviews with imprisoned rebels and a 45-page analysis written by the rebels, tracing the group’s evolution from its origins under Mr. Guzmán, that was captured by military intelligence here in December.
Meanwhile, the last we had heard of former Peruvian president and Shining Path nemesis Alberto Fujimori was in 2007 when he made Japanese political history as perhaps the first person to run for parliamentary election while under house arrest in a foreign country (he lost). Today, he remains in a Peruvian jail after the country’s Supreme Court upheld his 2007 convictions for abuses of power during his time as president. His trial for human rights violations is apparently still ongoing. This BBC profile provides a pretty much up to date record of Fujimori’s status, in addition to an overview of his background (I never knew he was an agricultural engineer before becoming president!).
NKorea slams Japan over kidnap issue
Tue Mar 10, 9:56 am ET
SEOUL (AFP) – North Korea accused Japan Tuesday of raising an outcry over the abduction of its civilians in an attempt to find a pretext for recolonising the peninsula.
The North said its military would launch a “merciless” strike on Japan if the former colonial power “dare pre-empt an attack” on the communist country.
The warning came as relatives of a Japanese woman kidnapped by North Korea arrived in South Korea in an attempt to clarify her fate.
Japan, which colonised the Korean peninsula 1910-1945, is trying to find an “absurd” excuse to realise its ambitions for re-invasion, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said in a commentary, without referring to the case of Yaeko Taguchi.
“Japan’s noisy and disturbing trumpeting about ‘the abduction issue’ is nothing but a prelude to its operation to stage a comeback to Korea,” the agency said.
…
Taguchi‘s family will meet Kim Hyun-Hee, a pardoned former spy for the North, in the southern city of Busan on Wednesday.
Taguchi’s elder brother Shigeo Iizuka, 70, and her son, Koichi Iizuka, 32, arrived in Busan along with Japanese officials, Yonhap news agency said.
Pyongyang has admitted kidnapping Taguchi in 1978 when she was 22 to train its spies, but said she died in a car crash in July 1986.
But the ex-spy Kim, who had taken Japanese lessons from Taguchi, has said in interviews with local media that Taguchi was alive until at least 1987.
The article makes it sound like the North is plainly spitting in the face of the abduction victim families. But not even North Korea is that tone-deaf. No, their style is much more Norimitsu Onishi than Cruella DeVille. The actual KCNA story says nothing about the PR efforts of the abduction victims and concentrates only the recent statement of someone we’ve covered here before:
KCNA Slams Japanese Militarists’ Agitation of War
Tamogami, former chief of staff of the Air “Self-Defense Force”, in a recent lecture given on the subject of “the abduction issue”, let loose a spate of reckless remarks calling on Japan to “take the posture of attacking north Korea by mobilizing the SDF.”
These are unpardonable outbursts which can be heard only from a man who is hell-bent on the moves to escalate the confrontation with the DPRK and start a war against it.
As well known to the world, Tamogami is a wicked Right-wing reactionary cursed and censured at home and abroad for having spoken for the Japanese militarist forces of late.
What he uttered is peppered with a spate of sophism intended to turn Japan into a military power and realize overseas expansion let loose by the successive Japanese reactionaries ranging from reckless remarks shamelessly whitewashing their past war of aggression to outbursts claiming access to nuclear weapons and the exercise of the “right to collective self-defense.”
Tomogami’s utterances indicate that the Japanese reactionaries’ wild ambition to conquer the Korean Peninsula and other countries in Asia and the rest of the world has reached an extreme phase. This is not only a blatant challenge to the DPRK’s sovereignty but a serious threat to the peace and security of Asia.
…
The provocative jargon let loose by Tamogami suffices to prove that he is an offspring of those who advocated the militarization of the Japanese society and the process to turn it reactionary and an icon of militarist Japan bereft of the normal way of thinking and off the track of normal development.
The AFP sees a timing decision in this KCNA story, but I am sure the KCNA editors would argue that Tamogami’s timing is too perfect as he is raising his voice at a time of heightened tensions and on a day when the morning news shows all feature the tearful meeting between the plane bomber and the abduction victims. Here is what he said during the February 28 speech specifically on the abduction issue to 250 people at an event sponsored by a “citizens’ group” in Nagoya:
“The abduction issue will not be resolved unless we show (North Korea) a posture that we will beat you to a pulp, even if we have to mobilize the Self Defense Forces.”… When asked specifically what he meant by “beat you to a pulp,” he stated, “North Korea will not budge unless we show the posture that we will use the Self Defense Forces to attack.”
Masumoto and Tamogami
Interestingly, Teruaki Masumoto, secretary general of the abductee families association and younger brother of an abductee, seemed to agree with Tamogami: “If we could mobilize our Self Defense Force in the same manner as other countries, we could have sunk the spy ships and considerably lessened the number of abductees.”
That North Korea is the detested rogue state that actually perpetrated the kidnappings (and likely murdered/forced suicide on many of them, all under state sponsorship) goes without saying. Nothing can be more absurd than the KCNA’s fantasy of having credibility on this issue, or on just about any issue for that matter. But while it is always perilous to see North Korea’s side of any debate, I want to emphasize two things:
This insistence on characterizing the most radical right wing elements in Japan as the voice of an influential group who could incite warlike rage in the Japanese populace at a moment’s notice is typical of many “liberal” Japan observers, and it’s no less wrong when they do it. If anything, the far right engages in guerrilla PR tactics to wedge the Japanese government toward one policy or another. That is hardly the image of a group that’s in control. It’s one of the ultimate arguments to keep Japan a weakened client state and it’s a powerful one at that.
To that end, the abduction victims’ movement doesn’t seem to be helping assuage such concerns. Have the victims’ groups ever met a right-wing demagogue they didn’t like? You have to wonder how far they are willing to take their campaign to prioritize this issue over a possible nuclear showdown. Far from denouncing Tamogami’s comment, the groups appear to be welcoming him into the fold (perhaps a smart move for someone with right-wing political ambitions). On March 6, a week after the controversial comment, leaders of two such groups joined Tamogami for a rally to save the abduction victims. His speech title: “Correct Historical Recognition and the Abduction Issue.”
Seeing Adam’s reference to the highly disputed pieces of worthless, barren rock known as Takeshima/Dokdo in his post just now reminded me of this, which I had been meaning to post. A Korean classmate of mine at Kyoto University picked up this wet hand tissue from what she described as a very normal restaurant in Korea. It reads:
Republic Of Korea wet tissue
Dokdo is our land.
To translate into Japanese, which as usual maps closely to the original Korean better than English:
大～韓民国 御絞り
獨島 は我が土
Dokdo is of course the Korean name for Takeshima, which in European languages used to be called the Liancourt Islets, and is now called whichever of the two stupid names will make your conversation partner happy.
Today Mrs. Adamu and I went jogging around the Imperial Palace moat, an activity that is apparently all the rage these days. Mrs. Adamu is training for a half marathon, but I do one slow lap myself just to burn some calories. It is easy to see why the palace area has become a popular place to exercise – it is an unimpeded, smoothly paved path, the view is gorgeous, and it’s easily accessible from Otemachi or other surrounding stations. The downside, of course, is that the jogging traffic has begun to resemble a busy freeway, forcing slowpokes like me to constantly watch my back so as to not get in the way of the more serious athletes. Normal tourists visiting the grounds are also quite visibly inconvenienced by bespandexed Tokyoites rushing by.
But all in all it’s a great experience. Today was particularly eventful:
Happy Takeshima Day! The holiday set up by the Shimane Prefectural government in 2005 to remind their fellow citizens that the disputed rocks belong to Japan, not Korea. This is apparently a big deal to right wing groups (see Roy’s earlier post on this), so to commemorate, one decided to use its megaphones outside the Social Democratic Party headquarters to loudly berate them with accusations of treason for close ties to North Korea. BTW, these guys might think their country has a valid claim to the Takeshima rocks, but stamp expert/blogger Yosuke Naito shows us some fairly convincing Korean stamps that say otherwise.
Workers were emptying the shuttered Palace Hotel of furniture and other items. The hotel was set up in 1961, just before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, on the site of what was once part of the Imperial Household Ministry and then a GHQ-run hotel “for the exclusive use of buying agents from abroad.” While it must have looked quite modern in 1961, more than 40 years later the design resembles a Holiday Inn and noticeably clashes with the more refined palace across the street. The current building will be torn down, with a renewed Palace Hotel will set to open on the site in 2012. We started jogging the imperial grounds in mid-January, just weeks before the Palace Hotel shut down. We thankfully at least got to take a peek at the lobby before it was relegated to the history books. The inside looked much grander than the exterior, with obsequious front desk staff, expensive-looking lounges, and old-school carpeting and wood-panel walls. By far the neatest item in the lobby, however, was a wood-carved clock, shaped like a world map with digital displays showing the time in major cities. It was considered cutting-edge at the time it was unveiled at the time of the hotel’s opening. The thing just oozes 1960s modernity – I could picture this on the wall of an enormous workroom full of office ladies working on typewriters (click for full size. Thanks Yomiuri!):
Amazingly, no one knows who designed or manufactured the clock despite its iconic status, but one thing is for certain – it will live on. Though originally set to be destroyed after the hotel closed, at the last minute a German patent office decided to take it (for no charge except shipping costs) out of the management’s nostalgia for frequent stays at the hotel during business trips to Tokyo.
When you’re the prime minister of Japan, those in your own party think you’re a joke AND your finance minister resigns in disgrace after makign a drunken ass of himself on the world stage, what should you do to reassure the citizenry that you’re doing a good job?
Simple – change the subject to cute puppies. Here’s a clip from his latest e-mail magazine:
The Prime Minister’s Office usually has only human visitors,
but last week I received a visit from service dogs accompanied by
their users, including this woman.
Service dogs are a type of assistance dog, just like guide dogs for
visually disabled people and hearing dogs for people with hearing
disabilities. The role of service dogs is to help their physically
challenged users with tasks such as opening doors or getting
changed.
I heard that Sherry is able to open the refrigerator downstairs,
take out a plastic drink bottle, close the refrigerator door,
and then bring the bottle upstairs. Also, I saw for myself
how a service dog called Elmo was able to pick up a business card
holder dropped on the floor when his wheelchair-bound user gave
the command, “Take!”
…
I myself have lived with dogs for as long as I can remember. Shiro
and Lucky were the names of my two mongrel dogs — one had been
picked up by the local healthcare center and the other was about to
be used for animal experiments.
When I was a child, it was my daily job to feed them and take them
out for walks. When Shiro died, I could not stop crying as
I recalled how he was when he was healthy, and the way he would
always come rushing out happily to greet me each time I returned
home. This was the time when the importance and preciousness of
life were instilled in my young mind.
Given my own experience, I believe that coming into contact with
animals is highly beneficial in many ways for the development of
children.
…
Assistance dogs are partners for physically challenged people,
acting as extensions of their bodies. The government will step up
its efforts to make assistance dogs more common, through measures
such as putting its weight behind assistance dog training.
At the same time, I would like as many people as possible,
including readers of this e-mail magazine, to know about assistance
dogs. That is my sincere wish.
So, is this some kind of subtle cry for help? Does he want a guide dog of his own? Whatever the case, the image is kind of a step removed from the determination to fix the economy as shown in this attention-grabber:
The full story is here. He says it’s the latter, but we all know better.
UPDATE: News services are now reporting that Nakagawa is going to resign, citing this incident as the cause. Apparently they finally got over their implicit agreement not to mention his obvious drinking problem.
WOODS HOLE — A federal appeals court recently upheld a ruling from a lower court that dismissed a lawsuit from a former Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researcher, who claimed he was unjustly fired for not believing in evolution.
Nathaniel Abraham, who was hired as a postdoctoral investigator in fall 2004 for his expertise in working with zebrafish, sued WHOI for discrimination in 2007. Abraham claimed he was fired after admitting he was a Christian who believes in creationism and the infallible word of God.
However, WHOI officials told the Times that Abraham’s job description clearly stated he would have to apply evolutionary theory in reviewing the results of research.
A U.S. District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit in April 2008 because Abraham did not file his discrimination claim within three years of being fired.
On Jan. 22, the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s ruling.
Abraham’s last known job was teaching biology at Liberty University in Virginia, a college founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. He could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Academic freedom is a grand thing, but to deserve academic freedon, one should probably be doing academics-and of course fulfilling the actual job description one agreed to when hired. As a personal note, I’ve spent a lot of time near the WHIO, located in Woods Hole, Cape Cod, Massechusets as Woods Hole is a division of Falmouth, where my father’s parents used to live when I was a child, and where my father now owns a second house. The aquarium was a lot of fun as a kid, as well as the tiny bridge that opens for passing ships, which I thought was the coolest thing ever when I was small enough for the bridge to seem big.
