Just a note or two here.
I am busy with school. My site stats are now more influenced by students returning to school looking for resources about Jakarta than porn addicts looking for “Javanese sex positions” (which was actually one search phrase used to get to my site believe it or not).
I am working on some household organizing here. I have linked pdf. files with the journal citations on the Urban Studies Reading List page. This is still a work in progress and I will say more on that later but for now note the articles are interesting and worth a look. I hope it will prove useful, especially for students in Jakarta who might not have these resources.
AND…
The Republican Party of the United States of America is having its convention this week. It was almost erased by Hurricane Gustav but they are back at it (although Gustav did afford a convenient excuse for some not to show up, namely our current President).
As you may or may not know the Republican candidate, who is running against Barack Obama, is John McCain. McCain is 72 years old, a cancer survivor, and a former fighter pilot who was shot down during the Vietnam War and then spent five years as a POW in the famous Hanoi Hilton. You get the picture? He is an American WAR HERO. But I don’t believe any of it.
Imagine, if you will, that you live in a poor country, a VERY poor country. Say your country was once a European colony for several hundred years. Now say you were fighting a national war of liberation and then along comes the most powerful country in the world which starts to drop tons and tons and tons of bombs on your villages, towns, and cities.
If you shot down one of those planes and captured the pilot what would you have done?
Frankly, John McCain is lucky to be alive.
If it had been me and my fellow villagers who had captured him I assure you I would have pitch-forked him through the heart and stuck his head atop a sharpened bamboo pike.
No, John McCain is no hero of mine. He deserved what he got and more that he didn’t get. Anyone who understands the Vietnam war understands that. A poor people in a poor country defeated, in detail, the most powerful nation on the earth. The United States threw everything they had, short of a nuclear weapon, at that country.
The Vietnamese would not bend or break.
Go figure.
Still, it is difficult to call McCain a war criminal in light of what has transpired over the last five years. Maybe he is just a minor league player looking to be promoted to the big leagues of World War III. No joke.
Now, McCain, being the great WAR HERO that he is, just this week picked Sarah Palin as his Vice presidential running mate. Here is what the New York Times editorial said of this today:
Editorial
Candidate McCain’s Big Decision
Published: September 2, 2008
“As far as we can tell, Mr. McCain and his aides did almost no due diligence before choosing Ms. Palin, raising serious questions about his management skills. The fact that Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant is irrelevant to her candidacy. There are, however, very serious questions about her political past and her ideology, including her links to a party advocating Alaska’s secession from the nation.
If Mr. McCain wanted to break with his party’s past and choose the Republicans’ first female presidential candidate, there a number of politicians out there with far greater experience and stature than Ms. Palin, who has been in Alaska’s Statehouse for less than two years.
Before she was elected governor, she was mayor of a tiny Anchorage suburb, where her greatest accomplishment was raising the sales tax to build a hockey rink. According to Time magazine, she also sought to have books banned from the local library and threatened to fire the librarian.
For Mr. McCain to go on claiming that Mr. Obama has too little experience to be president after almost three years in the United States Senate is laughable now that he has announced that someone with no national or foreign policy experience is qualified to replace him, if necessary.
Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has been one of Mr. McCain’s most loyal friends, said Tuesday that he was certain that Ms. Palin would take the right positions on issues like Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Georgia and Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. That seemed based largely on his repeated assertion that Ms. Palin would be tended by Mr. McCain’s foreign policy advisers. That was not much of an endorsement.
Some of the things Ms. Palin has had to say in the recent past about foreign policy are especially worrisome. In a speech last June to her former church in Wasilla, Ms. Palin said the war in Iraq was “a task that is from God.” Mr. Bush made similar claims as he rejected all sound mortal advice on how to conduct the war.
Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and others also claim that Ms. Palin is a fearless reformer who is committed to fighting waste, fraud and earmarks. Ms. Palin did show courage taking on some of the Alaska Republican Party’s most sleazy politicians. But she also was an eager recipient of earmarked money as a mayor and governor.
Mayor Palin gathered up $27 million in subsidies from Washington, $15 million of it for a railroad from her town to the ski resort hometown of Senator Ted Stevens, now under indictment for failing to report gifts.
The Republicans are presenting Ms. Palin as a crusader against Mr. Stevens’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” The record says otherwise; she initially supported Mr. Stevens’s boondoggle, diverting the money to other projects when the bridge became a political disaster. In her speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God in June, Ms. Palin said it was “God’s will” that the federal government contribute to a $30 billion gas pipeline she wants built in Alaska.”
Then there is this from Joe Klein, Time Magazine:
September 3, 2008 2:04
Angry Amateurs
The story of the day out here in Minneapolis is the McCain campaign’s war against the press. This has been building for some time. Those of us who have criticized the candidate–and especially those of us who enjoyed good relations with McCain in the past–have been subject to off-the-record browbeating and attempted bullying all year. But things have gotten much worse in recent days: there was McCain’s rude, bizarre interview with Time Magazine last week. Yesterday, McCain refused to an interview with Larry King, for God’s sake, because Campbell Brown had been caught in the commission of journalism on CNN the night before, asking McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds what decisions Sarah Palin had made as commander-in-chief of the Alaska national guard. (There was an answer that the unprepared Bounds didn’t have: she had deployed them to fight fires.)
So what’s going on here? Two things. McCain is just plain angry at us. By the evidence presented in the utterly revealing Time interview, he’s ballistic. This is a politician who needs to see himself as the man on the white horse, boldly traversing a muddy field…any intimations that he’s gotten muddied in the process, or has decided to throw mud, are intolerable.
The second thing is more insidious: Steve Schmidt has decided, for tactical reasons, to slime the press. He wants the public to believe that there is an unfair–sexist (you gotta love it)–personal assault going on against Palin and her family. This is a smokescreen, intended to divert attention from the very real and responsible vetting that is taking place in the media–about the substance of Palin’s record as mayor and governor. Sure, there are a few outliers–and the tabloid press–who have fixed on baby stories. That was inevitable….the flip side of the personal stories that the McCain team thought would work to their advantage–Palin’s moose-hunting and wolf-shooting, and her admirable decision to have a Down Syndrome baby. And yes, when we all fix on the same story, whether it’s a hurricane or a little-known politician, a zoo ensues. But the media coverage of the Palin story has been well within the bounds of responsibility. Schmidt is trying to make it seem otherwise, a desperate tactic.
There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is “a task from God.” The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme. …>go to article
ONLY the Republicans can spin dog shit into cotton candy and fully expect Americans to eat it.
Unfortunately they often do eat it and even come back for more.
Unfortunately the rest of the world pays for it.
Go figure.
This is the person who will be one heart beat away from becoming President of the United States should the 72 year old McCain not be able to complete his term in office.
I pray that this bitter cup pass from us.
