[Yunnan Province, China; July 10. Image via Getty]

A girl sleeps on a stool after a moderate 5.7-magnitude quake struck on July 10, 2009 in Yao'an county, in China's southwestern Yunnan province on July 9. More than 400,000 people were being evacuated after an earthquake hit southwest China, killing one person, injuring hundreds and flattening more than 18,000 homes, officials said. CHINA OUT AFP PHOTO/STR (Photo credit should read AFP/AFP/Getty Images)

[Beichuan, Sichuan Province, China; May 10. Image via Getty]

MIANYANG, SICHUAN - MAY 10: A girl sits in the temporary classroom having a class at Anxian Primary School on May 10, 2009 in Beichuan of Sichuan Province, China. Many commemoration activities are being held to mark the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake which struck Sichuan Province on May 12, 2008, claiming nearly 90,000 lives. Over 680 reconstruction projects, ranging from infrastructure to cultural and tourism sectors, are underway to rebuild the quake-stricken areas, requiring a total investment of around 248 billion US dollars. (Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images)

[Chendu, Sichuan, China; May 7. Image via Getty]

CHENGDU, SICHUAN - MAY 07: Four women who were injured in the Sichuan earthquake sing at the rehabilitation centre of Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital on May 7, 2009 in Chengdu of Sichuan Province, China. Around 226 people wounded in the earthquake have received medical care at the Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital's rehabilitation centre, where 59 of them are still undergoing treatment. Many commemoration activities are being held to mark the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake which struck Sichuan Province on May 12, 2008, claiming nearly 90,000 lives. Over 680 reconstruction projects, ranging from infrastructure to cultural and tourism sectors, are underway to rebuild the quake-stricken areas, requiring a total investment of around 248 billion US dollars. (Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images)

MOE: Did you know Obama was a skilled card player? Surprise of the day! Anything else you can think to talk about? Anything at all? I was going to try and get us to read up on whether oil prices are a bubble. I think sorta! Unrelated: has Maureen Dowd gotten even more insane?
MEGAN: Let me read Maureen and make that determination while you read about how a certain lapdog mauled its owner when he found out he was being fed Facon instead of Bacon.

MEGAN: Completely insane. That's, like, practically insulting to everyone involved. Also, who'd'a thunk that she could try so little and still piss off an entire region of the country by making fun of their accents? She's right about Bill Clinton being ruddy. That's about the only thing.
MOE: Hahaha imagery! And who is the so-called "liberal media" in McClellan's case? Like when people tell their dogs to attack swarthy complected strangers who approached the house? But the people are about to set a 9 alarm fire to the house for insurance so the strangers are actually their friends? Anyway I have to say, I'd hate Bush if I were Scott McClellan too but I'm surprised by the intensity/sincerity?

MEGAN: Yeah, I mean, I guess he just got sick of looking stupid and incompetent or something? For my part, what I'm reading it's like a missive from an ex who still loves you but recognizes and even excuses some of your flaws (I know when you stood me up that time it was all your best friend's fault!) but in the end just wants you to know that s/he's just so tired of feeling stupid for loving you. I'm apparently all about metaphors today.

MOE: You know what I like? How Karl Rove comes off with all the evil and none of the genius. McClellan was obviously so far outside the loop he wasn't even in the same time zone as these crooks. And back to your stupid argument:

“There is only one moment during the leak episode that I am reluctant to discuss,” he writes. “It was in 2005, during a time when attention was focusing on Rove and Libby, and it sticks vividly in my mind. … Following [a meeting in Chief of Staff Andy Card’s office], … Scooter Libby was walking to the entryway as he prepared to depart when Karl turned to get his attention. ‘You have time to visit?’ Karl asked. ‘Yeah,’ replied Libby. “I have no idea what they discussed, but it seemed suspicious for these two, whom I had never noticed spending any one-on-one time together, to go behind closed doors and visit privately. …

MOE: At least one of them, Rove, it was publicly known at the time, had at best misled me by not sharing relevant information, and credible rumors were spreading that the other, Libby, had done at least as much. …
McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush's liberal critics and even charges: “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. “The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

MEGAN: They were too nice to him! Awww. It's like, why didn't you make me seeeeee how bad he was for me??
MOE: Do we have the next David Brock on our hand?
MOE: s
MOE: okay making coffee brb
MEGAN: Well, we will once the Administration rips off his neck and shits down his throat, in 5...4...3...
MEGAN: Oh, holy shit, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao got himself a Facebook page.
MOE: Great Wall Of Facebook ... snicker
MOE: And we have the earthquake to thank!
MEGAN: And it connects to his Flickr!!
MOE: More than 500 people have written on his wall.
MOE:

The page appears to have been set up recently. It is not clear whether Wen, 65, did it himself. Perhaps another government official put it up, or, just as likely, someone with no ties to Wen.

MEGAN: More than 1,000 people have written on it as of right now, actually.

MOE: So far this is the most profound I've found in English

Evelyn Chang (China) wrote
at 9:06am
Please do take care of yourself!!!!
I know there are many tough problems in China,but don't push yourself too much.
You care about Chinese people,and Chinese people also care about you.

MOE:

Cindy Zhang wrote
at 9:04am
John Doededoe i read quite a few your posting and have to response. First i live in austrlain and have been in last 20 year and did not support chinese government until torch relay so i have nothing to gain in support chinese government, since they never pay anything for me.
You impression of china is distorted by biasd western media and if you only read repression of china after incident i would blame western media.
You mentioned Tiananmen square, but i tell you china has come a long way not just in economy but also in personal and political freedom and i hope your view of china can be updated as well, just like we should not use the histroy of black slave as a reason to again today's USA government. I hope i really want to know china go to china and talk to its ppl as some of view about china is breath taking

MEGAN: It sort of makes me wish I could read Mandarin (I'm assuming it's in Mandarin and not Cantonese).
MOE: The characters are the same no matter what dialect you use.
MEGAN: Ah, my former roommate never told me that. Of course, she hated
me, so she didn't tell me a lot of things.

MOE: But in China (and Singapore) they use simplified versions of them. And in Hong Kong and Taiwan (which speak separate dialects, Cantonese and Taiwanese or Hokkien) they use the old school versions.
MEGAN: Except that when she was young she was a liberal arts major, too, but then she wised up and went to business school and I would, too.
MOE: That's still my plan
MEGAN: She was from Hong Kong, but her parents moved before the transition so they wouldn't lose all their money.
MEGAN: Well, I don't know how great a plan it was for her, but I can tell you how staying a German Lit major ended up for me. Umm, well, I mean, I guess you already know.
MOE: Here's some sophisticated analysis:

Michael Kingston wrote
at 8:59am
I get tired of some people who always give examples of 1 particular person detained or jailed for speaking against the government. The truth is, millions of chinese protest against the gov. every year, and sometimes the gov. gives in. Its no different frm the west.

MEGAN: Can we friend that idiot?
MOE: I like the first 25 pages of Death In Venice btw! But reading it made me somehow woozy. I need a vacation too.
MEGAN: Yeah, it's kind of trippy, right? Luckily, you don't have that many more pages to go. I don't want to spoil it for you, but somebody dies!
MOE: Did you read TRex's post When Good Droids Go Bad?

Goddamn, can we PLEASE just send Karl Rove to Gitmo until we can arrange a suitable trial for him? You know, like, whenever we get around to it?

He'd also like to send Bush to Gruinard a.k.a. Scotland's Anthrax Island, which I didn't know about. (Thanks TRex!) It's always weird reading stories about weapons of mass destruction andsuch dated shortly before 9/11. Somewhere some guy was like, "DUUUDE, I totally did my thesis on this dammit!" Oh and speaking of — well not really, did you catch the interview with Frank Fukuyama?

MEGAN: TRex interviewed Fukuyama? Dude, I would pay actual money to see that.
MEGAN: Just like I'd sorta like to see the look on the Myanmar embassy staff's faces when they start opening up envelope after envelope of used granny panties.

MOE: I touched on it yesterday in News Roundup…There's some stuff about US-Australian relations toward the end which is kind of boring but basically he loves Obama, he is totally over "hard power"…This is the important part:
MOE:

There needs to be great downplaying of the whole war on terrorism. To call it a war I think has over-militarised our objectives and the means that we have used to prosecute it, and I think there has to be a greater shift to the use of soft power in projecting American influence and then there are large areas of the world where we have kind of neglected thinking about things like east Asia where you have obviously got some very big changes going off.

Not a lot of conservatives have gone out and said that. That said, Fukuyama was never a huge jihad guy. We mostly talked about the Latins and the Asians in the class I took. He was going through this phase where he was super into encouraging and galvanizing societal "trust" — which was why I never took him seriously as a neocon.
MEGAN: That must've been, like, his End of History period, right?

MOE: "The End of History" was 1989 I believe, and this was 1998. He had moved on to some Joseph Putnam shit, corporate culture, this book that sort of blamed The Pill for all the West's modern social problems…terror was less on the agenda. I mean, it sort of makes sense. Remember studying policsci in college? Remember all the dual degree engineers and weirdos who threw themselves into covering the "rogue states"? I remember thinking, "Dudes, you know China is going to be a much bigger deal, right?" Well. Not when it comes to getting in on the DoD budget!
MEGAN: I, um, never took a single PoliSci class in college. I was a German Lit and a Sociology major and I minored in History
MEGAN: Also, I finished college in 1999, I'm not sure if rogue states were quite in vogue yet. Maybe they were. I avoided both the PoliSci and IR departments like the plague. Those people were all really, really intense and kind of annoying knowitalls. Yes, I recognize the irony of me saying that.
MOE: Speaking of, what group of auditors and appropriations monitors is worse off than our financial regulatory system?

MOE: Rogue states were totes the rage in some of my classes. But I also went to Penn, where…a lot of kids went on birthright trips.
MEGAN: See, I think the real question is whether the continuing lack of political appointees hurts or actually fucking helps that.
MEGAN: I didn't get a birthright, let alone a birthright trip.
MOE: (And by the way haters I had a wonderful experience and wouldn't change it for …well maybe I would go back and study economics and Russian lit at a small liberal arts college with a slightly lower tool ratio but, anyway, i dropped out because I didn't have the money. That is all.) Finally though.
MOE: Firedoglake wants to know why all these people who leave always express their fondness for the president even as they admit his administration ushered in an era of unprecedented corruption and inhumanity etc. etc.
MOE: And I think about that a lot and I think the answer is simply that the president is retarded.

MEGAN: Washington has elevated CYA to an art form. It's the only place where you can have your cake and eat it, too, and get two birds in the hand and still leave one in a bush. It's where you can sell your boss and all your former colleagues downriver for the sake of your career and still claim that you like and respect them.
MOE: Ahem, I don't think that's really how it went down with Paul O'Neill.
MEGAN: You gotta practice talking out of both sides of your mouth before you come, and Scottie was the White House Press Secretary, he could probably talk out of both sides and the middle.
MOE: See I disagree? What good does it do to say you respect and admire that imbecile? And meanwhile vilify everyone involved in the administration who might have to hold a job later on? I think there's a class of Bush administration defectors — and he's in the camp with O'Neill and the Italian faith-based organization dude Suskind also wrote about —- who look at it like a cult sorta.
MEGAN: Well, but who is going to get him a job? Pay for his speaking engagements? Karl Rove, who thought that Scottie was an idiot? Or the people that think he should be loyal to Bush (his former boss) but don't give a shit about the other people? He's got to prove he's not a fool while still showing loyalty. I think, on that score, he's pretty successful.

MEGAN: So, do you want to start with the slideshow of hotness that is Obama's personal aide? I mean, the article's nice, blah blah blah, but really, I think its purpose should just be to allow us to ooh and ahh over the dude.
MOE: Dude the hottest dude today is the Marine on the fucking front page of the Times and I fucking CAN'T FIND IT ONLINE.
MEGAN: This guy?
MOE: It should go with this story…do you see a picture there? Mine's not loading. I may have to scan. To support the troops, you know. Did you get through any of the New Yorker piece I sent on Fadl vs. Zawahiri?
MOE: And yeah, that guy! He just defeated the Taliban or something!
MEGAN: By the way, for the amusement of all, by Gchat banner ad is now this: "Dictionary.com Word of the Day - ribald: characterized by, or given to, vulgar humor."

MEGAN: Well, I think in the grand tradition of good friends, it's a great thing that you and I have very different taste in men. You can have your Marine, and I'll take the aide and we can both be happy!
MEGAN: Though I think we can all agree that any ladyboner can most easily be killed with this, which greeted me on the top of the New Yorker's site when I went to look for that article.
MOE: How was your weekend? I'm trying to think of some ribald conversations that transpired but 1. I don't really know what constitutes "ribald" when I just volunteered my fear that I had genital warts and 2. I actually ended up having a weirdly serious drunk conversation with a friend about God, and how he thought the Left was going to reclaim Jesus, and then I read half this piece about the jihad movement's ongoing internal debate over just how violent they really need to be and…uh…got a sunburn. Through a pair of black jeans.
MOE: It's…um…
MOE: Not Timid, that shot.
MEGAN: Yes. Not Timid is a good way of phrasing it.
MEGAN: Um, my weekend? Pretty relaxing, not much happened, you know, just had this little piece published in a minor news outlet.
MOE: So what's the deal? Do you want to read about Roger Stone while I examine the future of jihad?
MEGAN: I mean, want is probably a strong word since the article starts in a swinger club and one is thus forced to consider the thought of that man fucking, but yes, I'll do it as I think I'll garner more of an understanding out of that than the jihadist piece before coffee.
MOE: In the meantime China's not forcing fines or abortions on anyone who decides to get pregnant after losing kids to the earthquake. (To be fair: China stopped forcing abortions three years ago, I think, but it still happens sometimes?) Bill Clinton said a lot of idiotic things about how there's some vast elitist conspiracy to cover up the fact that Hillary is the inevitable next president and McCain asked Obama to visit Iraq with him, which I think is an excellent idea since he's not exactly safe here, as Hillary so saliently pointed out the other day.
MEGAN: Ok, well, now, my gag reflex has woken me up.

Not long ago, Stone went to the Ink Monkey tattoo shop in Venice Beach and had a portrait of Nixon’s face applied to his back, right below the neck. “Women love it,” Stone said.

Ummm, we're all women, right? Because I think we can all give this a resounding thumbs down.
MEGAN: Also, by the way, the fact that Reps Anna Eshoo and George Miller endorsed Obama really just means that Nancy wants to because obviously they only do what they're told. And while that phrase sort of pisses me off, I also sort of wish that Pelosi was that steely and puppeteery because then she might get more shit done.
MOE: Oh Jesus at this point any Democrat who endorses Obama should just not bother me with their headlines. I'm trying to focus on the brotherhood here. Also dude I have to get that pic of that marine who is totally hot
MEGAN: I'll need it, too, to wash the Roger Stone stench out from under my nostrils.
MEGAN: Things like this quote, from a Democratic strategist:

He once said to me, ‘Are you black? Are you Hispanic? Are you gay?’ When I said no, he said, ‘Then why the fuck are you a Democrat? You should be with us.’

This guy should be denied all access to pussy, seriously. Pussy boycott.

MOE: Um, someone in my house whose name will go unmentioned is eating one of your Christmas cookies.
MOE: That's neither here nor there.
MEGAN: The pumpkin ones, or the nutmeg ones?

MOE: Lawrence Wright describing the changes in Cairo since he taught English there in the seventies reminds…me of China without the economic growth:

When I lived in Cairo, the population was about six million. Now it is three times that size. The unbearable congestion reflects the ungoverned quality of life in the city; pedestrians plunge into the anarchic traffic, their faces masked by fright or resignation. The virtual absence of any attempt to impose order—in the form of street lights or crosswalks—is characteristic of a government that has no sense of obligation to its people and seeks only to protect itself.

One day during my visit, I went to Cairo University, whose buildings are practically crumbling from neglect. There are nearly two hundred thousand students, a good many more than there were when Zawahiri and Fadl studied there. Although the campus was quiet, the mood of the students was troubled, if subdued. Their professors had been on strike because of low pay; in Cairo’s poorer neighborhoods, riots had broken out over the cost of bread, and, in a middle-class area, residents had marched against pollution. The government’s response to the desperation had been to round up eight hundred members of the Muslim Brotherhood and throw them in jail.

MEGAN: Is it a bad thing that I snorted at the last sentence? Because if it is, I don't wanna me good.
MOE: I was going to blockquote another paragpraph but that feels lazy so I'm gonna summarize: Egyptians, like a lot of Middle Easterners, were psyched about 9/11 bc they thought it would force Americans to reexamine their support of their corrupt autocratic regimes and help eke out a middle path that embraced neither the status quo nor Islamism. Sadly that did not happen. Turns out we are not so good with "middle paths." Oh and btw Iran has nukes it's a grave and serious and urgent threat!
MEGAN: Oooh, way to bury the good tidbits! So, Charlie Black who is the Big Bad Lobbyist in McCain's camp, until very recently worked for the firm that Stone helped found, which was bought by the firm that Mark Penn helps run.

“So what that means is that Mark Penn is Charlie Black’s boss,” Stone told me. “And they said I was sleazy.”

MEGAN: Ha, the Egyptians thought that having he crap bombed out of us would make us re-examine our support of corrupt and autocratic regimes? I guess their knowledge of history is at least as bad as most Americans'.

MOE: Holy shit. Okay, so the Lawrence Wright story profiles some of the jihadist movement's foremost dissenters, namely a doctor named Sayman Imam Al-Sharif aka Dr. Fadl who met Ayman al-Zawahiri in med school in 1968 — hey! another awesome thing that happened that year, alert the boomer era hagiographers — but became estranged from him in the nineties and went off to practice medicine in Yemen and last May tried to call the whole thing off in a letter to a newspaper.
MEGAN: Oh, so, he's like an idealist? One Op Ed can stop a jihad or something?


9:45 AM
MEGAN: Pen is mightier than the sword?
MOE: Etc. etc. ... well, I guess he is like the William F. Buckley of Jihad, you know? The intellectual center of the movement apparently. And so he had a lot of followers. One was a guy named Karam Zuhdy. The rift sort of began in the nineties and Zawahiri tried to preempt it by holding a mass shooting in Novemeber 1997 in the ruins of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple and 62 people died. ANYWAY, Zudhy and his pals would minister to prisoners and try to get them to first renounce terrorism, then extremism, etc…gradually try and reform them etc. etc.
MOE: Most poignant passage so far:

Many of these Islamists had fantasized that they would be hailed as heroes by their society; instead, they were isolated and rejected. Now Karam Zuhdy and other imprisoned leaders were asking the radicals to accept that they had been deluded from the beginning. It was an overwhelming spiritual defeat. “We began going from prison to prison,” Ahmed recalled. “Those boys would see their leaders giving them the new conception of the revisions.” Ahmed recalls that many of the prisoners were angry. “They would say, ‘You’ve been deceiving us for eighteen years! Why didn’t you say this before?’ ”

Despite such objections, the imprisoned members of the Islamic Group largely accepted the leaders’ new position. Ahmed says that he was initially skeptical of the prisoners’ apparent repentance, which looked like a ploy for better treatment; however, several of the participants in the discussions had already been sentenced to death and were wearing the red clothing that identifies a prisoner as a condemned man. They had nothing to gain. Ahmed says that one of these prisoners told him, “I’m not offering these revisions for Mubarak! I don’t care about this government. What is important is that I killed people—Copts, innocent persons—and before I meet God I should declare my sins.” Then the man burst into tears.

MEGAN: Wait, so, like, there's Reconciliation in Islam, too?
MEGAN: Also, it's sort of heartwarming that they learned that killing people is bad, though!
MOE: Yeah well if they can get the memo maybe even someone like Doug Feith could reject his old…haha no.

MEGAN: Wait! Wait! Maybe the secret is that you have to go to prison? Because I could be down on running that experiment with good ol' Dougie.

MOE: I got till 10:30 incidentally and scanned that picture and I'm pretty sure not even I expected that 30% of the auto sales in California are made with home equity loans…especially since it would appear that California also holds claim to the market with the highest average price-to-rent ratio, a pretty good barometer of how inflated a real estate market is. A place in East Bay, California costs — or cost past tense, anyway — 51 times its annual rent. 42.5 in San Jose. That is, just for the record, insane.
MEGAN: Yeah, my sister lives out there and in Palo Alto these cute little bungalows that are barely bigger than my condo or your apartment are, like, $1 million and people rent them out and I don't see how you'd have the money to pay that kind of rent and not buy the place.

MEGAN: On the other hand, 18% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the Earth.
MEGAN: Oh, hey, btw, weren't you asked what happened to Aung San Suu Kyi last week? The junta's decided to extend her detention by another year despite laws there that you can't be detained without trial for more than 5 years. Apparently, her being free while they're fucking up the country more is a bad thing.

A newspaper in Chongqing Municipality has been suspended from publishing due to its "unique" coverage of the Sichuan earthquake in which it used bikini-clad women to pose amongst the rubble on the front page, Chongqing Daily reported.

Now, I know that sounds relatively tame but…

The young women were wearing mini-shorts, bikinis and tight T-shirts in the photographs taken among earthquake debris. There was fake blood on their clothes and the photo spread was headlined "Reborn from the Ruins," the report said.

Okay, so to recap: a death toll more than a dozen times that of 9/11, due to a calamity that happened last week…So was this magazine just trying to one-up Alisa Schvartz? Or do some folks just have wayyyy sicker senses of humor than us? I'm going to go with the latter, but only because Greater China is the only place I ever ate at a concentration camp theme restaurant.

Newspaper Suspended, Editor Sacked For "Sexy Quake" Edition [Shanghai Daily]
Completely Unrelated: Sexy Earthquake

cMOE: Dude I don't want to forget this so I'm just showing you now. From Dick Morris's column on how McCain can beat Obama:

If the GOP nominee were Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, independents and Democrats might not vote Republican even if they became convinced that Obama is some kind of sleeper agent sent to charm and conquer our democracy.

MOE: um no kidding!
MEGAN: Why doesn't Dick Morris go back to sucking prostitutes' toes and leave the rest of us alone. Have you seen his teeth? He ain't stopped sucking stanky feet yet.

MOE: So there is too much to write about today but anyway Iran is still building a nuclear program, treaties be damned and we can't do anything about it, Burma is still letting its people die and Asian governments won't do anything about it, Hugo Chavez is supporting FARC and by any standard probably now qualifies for our state sponsors of terror list but we probably shouldn't give him the satisfaction, and now they're saying it's the end of American Superpower. For realz?!
MEGAN: Wait, wait! The NY Times is reporting this morning that Myanmar/Burma is going to let ASEAN help. I'm skeptical but maybe they actually will?

MOE: Ah, so their "soft approach" did work!

In a clear departure from the usually secretive style of the military junta, state television in Myanmar on Sunday showed video of the leader, Senior General Than Shwe, touring a refugee camp, checking supplies, patting the heads of babies and shaking hands with survivors. Some of the cyclone victims, surrounded by neat rows of blue tents, clasped their hands and bowed as the general and other senior military officials walked by.

MOE:

"Are we going to continue to cover the earthquake?" the Guangzhou-based reporter asked in an instant message to his editor, a day after China's deadliest earthquake in three decades struck Sichuan province."Of course," replied the editor, surnamed Yang. "Why not?"
Then, the reporter said, he forwarded to his boss the text of the latest edict from the propaganda department of the Communist Party Central Committee, ordering domestic news media not to send any more journalists to Sichuan.
Yang wrote back, "If everyone pays no attention to this, then it won't really be a ban."

MEGAN: Oh, she's probably still under house arrest. Like the regime wants to allow her ot be showed doing good work?
MOE: 40 years of mind control, propaganda, a string of incomprehensible, and incomprehensibly destructive political campaigns combined with severe rationing and poverty followed by 15 years of steady marginal increases in living standards and the appearance of openness will...do that to a citizenry!

MOE: I guess we should talk about how the crowd that showed up for Obama was like 1/8 the population of Portland? And maybe we should talk about how tiny his advance for Dreams From My Father was?
MOE: Oh and how a place as shit poor as Yemen manages to hide a guy with a $5 million price on his head. And also we should talk about oil prices. And McCain's continued purge of his aides who love lobbyists, which is getting like New York politicos with whores. And Anthony Shahid's fucking depressing story on Lebanon.

MEGAN: Ok, well, I can speak to the continued purge of lobbyists. Because there's one guy who isn't getting out. He's McCain's Mark Penn only potentially slightly less stupid. He's practically consolidating power in the campaign by getting rid of the other guys with lobbying ties, so that in November-January when clients are looking for someone with a good relationship to McCain that hasn't been accused of fucking him, he's the only one left. It's all very wonderfully Machiavellian.

MEGAN: Also, I think it's fair to say that Republican lobbyists understand the least about why people think they're shills out to destroy America and don't love McCain that much anyway, so it probably never occurred to anyone that it might be a teeny tiny problem to the electorate that the guy writing McCain's energy policy was an active lobbyist for energy companies. Because, hey, that's how this Administration has run things for 8 years anyway.
9:15 AM
MEGAN: As for the Yemen thing, it's actually a little funny because here, more and more people are tipping off their neighbors to pay their electric bills and shit and the economy goes into the toilet. So either the Yemenis are more loyal, or we're just that more desperate? Either way, my position has always been that I would totally turn in criminals for money, which is probably why my friends are all nerdy-upstanding types. One year at college there was a $1200 reward for a serial fire alarm puller and I was dying to know who it was because that was like, half of the money I'd make all semester otherwise.

MOE: Which reminds me of a point that I hope that Obama can make fairly. Re the "eight more years" thing. I think anyone who goes out of his way to say that a McCain administration would be "another eight years of the same" is doing a disservice to history. I think it's safe to say it would be historically impossible for another Administration to match this administration's singleminded dedication to the pursuit the interests of such a tiny group of corrupt people in all blatant disregard of democracy. I think we would be ill-advised to cheapen George W. Bush's "Worst President Ever" stain that way. No matter what happens in the general election January 20 will be a relatively good day for this country.
MOE: And regarding Yemen, I think it's safe to say we are less desperate.

MOE: And don't let me forget to bring up this fucking depressing story on the end of the era of cooperation between First and Third World countries that SOMEHOW begat the Green Revolution on the basis of a basic shared interest in the end of human suffering and not ADM profit margins.
MEGAN: Um, I don't thing McCain will be bad in the same way, but I think he's spent the last 8 years selling his soul to the Rovian devils in order to secure the nomination, and that doesn't make me particularly happy. There won't be a ton of turnover in terms of the kinds of people in middle management and shit because they're all working on his campaign and will be "owed"
MOE: This is pretty stark.

Adjusted for inflation, the World Bank cut its agricultural lending to $2 billion in 2004 from $7.7 billion in 1980.

MOE: Well, but what does McCain need with the Rovian devils now? Karl Rove is dispensing him free advice via his various punditry positions now.
MOE: There is just something that chills me about the "eight more years" refrain.

MEGAN: Well, and let's not forget that part of the problem with the IRRI's budget and people not working there is the fact that they were a proponent of biotechnology to get certain properties out of rice (salinity resistance, vitamins) that simply could not be bred in by convention means, and they were shit on by the world and the environmental movement, targeted for eco-terrorism and a lot of their developed-world money dried up over it, even though the Gold Rice project could've had serious benefits for the malnourished people of the world. I kept waiting for the article to mention that and it didn't.
MOE: Fuckin ecoterrorists. Anyway here we see shades of the pharmaceutical industry.

The insect is not a new problem. In the 1960s, the rice institute, nestled between jungle and the bustling town of Los Ba os, pioneered ways to help farmers grow two and even three crops a season, instead of one.

MOE: You talk to guys who develop drugs at pharmaceutical companies and they think it's absolutely shameful that if they want a drug to come to market these days they have to go to work on the next generation of lipitor or abilify or the drug that finally cures metabolic syndrome when there are still so many infectious diseases to be cured. At one point there was a Nature article suggesting the industry establish a non-profit pharmaceutical company to address diseases whose cures would not be money makers. The same should go for agriculture, you'd think. I don't really understand why all the philanthropy targeted at making life-improving technology more available to the third world seems to focus on hand-cranked laptops and stuff like that.

MEGAN: I think it's because a lot of philanthropy is corporate, it's designed to make companies look good to their consumers and stock holders, but those decisions are made by people within the company. So, of course that's the kind of corporate philanthropy they would engage in. And the pharmaceutical companies will pay tons of money to run those Prescription Partnership for America commercials and send out the buses and take a hit on giving medicines to a small subset of people who can't afford it rather than risk price controls, and they'll give away some AIDS medications in developing countries to keep patent rights.
9:35 AM
MEGAN: And Monsanto will spend millions of dollars spraying RoundUp on farmers fields to see if they're cheating on licensing rather than donating to the IRRI or developing drought-resistant wheat or something.
MEGAN: And everyone will give Bill Gates $1 million to research a cure for malaria or AIDS or whatever and claim that they're doing great shit and then go back to making money.
MEGAN: Anyway, if we're going to take today to be depressed about injustice, how about if you're taking medical marijuana while waiting for a transplant, you're pretty much not eligible for the transplant anymore?
MOE: Well I actually have a better answer to my own question that is not QUITE as cynical. The culture of Silicon Valley and the rapidness of the wealth creation that's happened there, the "open source-ness" of ideals, the existence of Microsoft monopolistic practices as a sort of anti-standard...the newness...the fact that the scientists in the case of the technology industry WERE the business founders and ARE the wealth holders...this swirl of factors makes electrical engineers and software engineers more idealistic and philanthropic I think. Whereas in pharmaceuticals and agriculture a lot of the scientific talent is still being managed by corporate shareholder-driven assholes because the barriers to entry are so much higher.
MEGAN: So, geeks think computers really can save the world, and everyone else is just faking it like I said? I'd buy that in moderation.
MOE: The thing is that: there are certain classes of people you might to run their businesses more ethically, less greedily...more thoughtfully...Hasidic-founded Kosher agriprocessing plants are no longer among them. (Did you read this story?) (Holy shit.)

MEGAN: I would be more surprised and outraged that this Administration is targeting illegal immigrants for arrest and deportation and doing virtually nothing to the management that hires them if I hadn't been living in this country for 30 years, probably.
MEGAN: And/or hadn't read that series in the WaPo last week about how unethically and illegally we treat supposedly-illegal immigrants while in custody.
MOE: And on that note I'll leave you with this from George Packer's New Yorker piece on conservatism:

MOE:

Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—"A little raw for today," he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in "the Old Roosevelt Coalition," it recommended that the White House "exacerbate the ideological division" between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon's policies; highlight "the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party"; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare.

Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. "Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country," Buchanan wrote. "We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention." Such gambits, he added, could "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."