Category: The Dish

The Economist is the only foreign news organisation with official approval to be in Tibet. The magazine’s correspondent writes from his perch in Lhasa:

So far, in this part of the city, the security forces appear to have acted with relative restraint. There are persistent but unsubstantiated reports of Tibetans killed by security forces during the rioting on Friday and Saturday. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, has spoken of unconfirmed reports of up to 100 deaths. But there are no convincing accounts of the kind of bloodshed involved in the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989 or in the suppression of the last serious outbreak of anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet earlier that year. With the approach of a deadline on Monday for rioters to surrender themselves, however, some residents fear that widespread and indiscriminate arrests will follow. […] By Sunday, the authorities appear to have regained control of the streets. Occasional shots were still being fired by troops in the alleyways (whether in warning or at human targets is unclear). Few residents in this normally bustling part of Lhasa now dare to venture out.

In a sign that the government is feeling more confident that its security measures are working, two representatives of the Tibetan administration’s Foreign Affairs Office visited this hotel in the riot-torn area.

They offered to help arrange a flight out if needed, but gave no order to depart. The Economist remains the only foreign news organisation with official approval to be in Tibet—which was applied for and granted well before the unrest broke out.

If residents are not to starve or run out of that daily necessity, yak butter (used in the tea Tibetans drink), a signal will have to be given soon that it is safe to venture out to buy essential supplies. Even when they give this, the authorities will still want to maintain a conspicuous force in the alleyways. Tensions are unlikely to subside rapidly. There are numerous anti-Chinese protests in what China calls the Tibet Autonomous Region as well as in the adjoining ethnic-Tibetan areas of China. Some of the biggest have occurred around Labrang in Gansu Province, one of Tibetan Buddhism’s biggest and most important monasteries. Many Tibetans see the approach of the Olympic games in Beijing in August as an unmissable opportunity to draw attention to their plight.

(Photo: Tibetan Buddhist monk in-exile walk over Chinese National flags as part of a protest in Dharamsala on March 16, 2008. The Dalai Lama condemned what he called China’s ‘rule of terror’ and ‘cultural genocide’ in Tibet, calling for an international probe into unrest in his homeland. By Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty.)

Here’s a reader’s account of attending the Indiana rally where Obama made these remarks on racial divides and misunderstanding:

I was there, the father of four young voters, three of them for Obama including the one Republican in the family. Two of us part of a million small donors and counting. And me not a new voter but a new activist, standing for election as a delegate for the first time.

Because of our usual late position on the calendar, this becomes Indiana’s first real contested and meaningful presidential primary since 1968, when Bobby Kennedy campaigned hard here and won the state. RFK’s words in Indianapolis the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination are inscribed on his gravestone and were recalled by Obama yesterday.

The overflow crowd in that Hoosier small town high school gym was white, black, rural, urban, male, female, young, old. All of us “little pieces of America”. To listen to Barack is to understand what patriotism based on open eyes, good faith and yes, hope is all about. The forces of fear and bigotry are loose upon the land, but  Obamas’s candidacy isn’t really about him, but about us. But we’ve got his back.

"Man, I am so Wes Craven right now …"

Paul Burka:

I thought that Obama was exempt from racial reactions because he was the Tiger Woods of politics. People looked at him and saw him not as someone who is black, but as someone who transcended race because of his unique skills and accomplishments. Not any more. He just triple bogeyed the presidency. He’s done. He was done the day he first heard Wright’s outbursts and didn’t resign from the congregation. There is no way that the superdelegates will send him out as the Democratic nominee now. The truth is, Obama did fine until the Clinton campaign began to attack him, and then he showed that he just wasn’t up to it. Better we find out now than later.

I really think this is off-base, but since some want to and others fear to believe it, it’s worth airing. Why do I think it’s off-base? Because I think that the kind of politics that ensures that someone’s pastor’s rhetoric trumps every other issue in a campaign is waning. Because many Americans understand that the country’s problems are really too deep for this kind of thing to be dispositive. Because Obama’s long record is transparently not in any way equatable with Jeremiah Wright’s worst moments on YouTube. And because of what David Kuo says here.

I have one other thought, which is that at some point Obama and Wright should maybe sit down together and thrash out what they believe in common and what they don’t. Give them a platform and let them talk. They’re both eloquent and could even do us a service in showing how an engaged, adult Christian can interact with a spiritual pastor with whom he doesn’t always share perspective or politics. In general, I think the best way to confront and defeat Morris-Rove politics is transparency. The best way to defuse fears is by exposing and airing the root of them.

He gets a very basic fact wrong in his opportunistically anti-Obama column this morning. Ambers:

The truth is that Obama did not attend church on July 22. He was on his way to campaign in Miami.

Kristol’s facts depend on Newsmax, a far-right Internet propaganda vehicle. Which means to say: thanks to Kristol, the NYT’s fact-checking is now dependent on far right smear artists.

It’s worth reading the full interview and the paper’s subsequent editorial. The details can get a bit mind-numbing, but I see no evidence of corruption here – just poor judgment. Here’s the money quote from the editorial:

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama waited 16 months to attempt the exorcism. But when he finally sat down with the Tribune editorial board Friday, Obama offered a lengthy and, to us, plausible explanation for the presence of now-indicted businessman Tony Rezko in his personal and political lives. The most remarkable facet of Obama’s 92-minute discussion was that, at the outset, he pledged to answer every question the three dozen Tribune journalists crammed into the room would put to him. And he did…

We’ve been saying since Nov. 3, 2006 — shortly after the Tribune broke the story of Obama’s house purchase — that Obama needed to fully explain his Rezko connection.

He also needed to realize how susceptible he had been to someone who wanted a piece of him — and how his skill at recognizing that covetousness needed to rise to the same stature as his popular appeal.

Friday’s session evidently fulfills both obligations. Might we all be surprised by some future disclosure? Obama’s critics have waited 16 months for some new and cataclysmic Rezko moment to implicate and doom Obama. It hasn’t happened…

Less protection, less control, would have meant less hassle for his campaign. That said, Barack Obama now has spoken about his ties to Tony Rezko in uncommon detail. That’s a standard for candor by which other presidential candidates facing serious inquiries now can be judged.

The proof!

Scott Castle says anti-smoking advocates are being somewhat counterproductive: 

It’s usually the bad guys and their henchmen who smoke, because it helps the audience identify them as evil. Smoking is also routinely used to show the stressed mental state of a character, like Laura Linney in "The Savages". The proposed ratings rule doesn’t discriminate between good guys and bad guys, or between glamorous or pathetic smokers, because the anti-smoking position is that any depiction of smoking, even a negative one, makes teenager more likely to smoke. […]

It’s not that the anti-smoking lobby doesn’t have a valid point to make, especially regarding the MPAA’s enforcement of their smoking policy. And their intentions are noble. The problem is their zero-tolerance approach, a policy that always leads to zero thinking–about the merits of individual films and the messages regarding smoking contained within them.

If this automatic R-rating for smoking gets implemented, why wouldn’t anti-drug groups demand an automatic R-rating for drug scenes? What about teen or unprotected sex? New York City’s anti-smoking mayor, Michael Bloomberg, went from banning smoking in bars and restaurants to banning trans-fats. With a growing child-obesity problem in America, why not ban scenes featuring fried chicken? Or at least run PSAs about the dangers of fatty foods prior to the offending film. Perhaps the answer is to simply excise all vice from films viewed by anyone under 17.

The MPAA should take smoking into account when rating films, in order to fulfil its mission to provide parents with a sense of what is suitable for their children. But automatically giving films with any hint of tobacco an R-rating puts the cart before the horse. Though it may help to further demonise the habit, it may end up making smoking seem more taboo, and therefore more cool to teenagers.

In a previous trip, McCain touted the fact that he was able to walk through al-Shorja market as a sign that the surge had succeeded. On his current trip, the market was off-limits, as John King explained:

We got close to that marketplace today, Jim, but our own security advisers here in Iraq did not want us to go there. They didn’t believe it was safe for an American to be in that area. We were in a thriving marketplace nearby… That one marketplace, as a matter of fact, you do see Iraqi police, you do see the Iraqi army, but in truth, that area is controlled by the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi army.

Apart from the obvious embarrassment, it strikes me as more revealing that King understands that the distinction between the "Iraqi" army and the Mahdi army is not always very clear.

"The African American Church was born out of the crucible of slavery and the legacy of prophetic African American preachers since slavery has been and continues to heal broken marginalized victims of social and economic injustices. This is an attack on the legacy of the African American Church which led and continues to lead the fight for human rights in America and around the world," – a press release from Chicago’s Trinity United Church Of Christ.

In fairness, it does seem to me incumbent on the media to do a story on the good work this congregation does in the inner city to provide a broader context for Jeremiah Wright’s intemperate and ugly tub-thumping.