Shrouded in fog, Xian, China via **Maurice**. Lovely.

Thought some folks might be interested in this, considering that the Chinese economy and ours are so intertwined at this point.  Lots of nuance here, as usual with anything dealing with the Chinese, diplomacy and the economy. 

But it’s especially touchy at the moment given the worldwide recession issues and how much US debt the Chinese are currently holding — which, in my mind anyway, diminishes our ability to leverage them on any concessions on trade imbalance, human rights or otherwise.  (Especially given our own recent track record on the same.) 

Thoughts?

btw, this transcript comes directly from the WH — this is their transcription, not mine. Just fyi.

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT THE U.S./CHINA STRATEGIC AND ECONOMIC DIALOGUE
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.
9:35 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Good morning. It is a great honor to welcome you to the first meeting of the Strategic Economic Dialogue between the United States and China. This is an essential step in advancing a positive, constructive, and comprehensive relationship between our countries. I’m pleased that President Hu shares my commitment to a sustained dialogue to enhance our shared interests.

President Hu and I both felt that it was important to get our relationship off to a good start. Of course, as a new President and also as a basketball fan, I have learned from the words of Yao Ming, who said, "No matter whether you are new or an old team member, you need time to adjust to one another." Well, through the constructive meetings that we’ve already had, and through this dialogue, I’m confident that we will meet Yao’s standard. (more…)

Boy, wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall when Jane Harman runs into John Kerry after this choice bit from Jeff Stein:

According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he "needed Jane" to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.

Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program.

Kind of makes you wonder how that next Democratic caucus meeting in the House is going to go.  So far all’s quiet on the democratic front.  More interestingly, the GOP is as well.

Above and beyond questions of being a traitor to the nation by offering to give a hand to an accused spy by "waddling into" an ongoing criminal investigation in exchange for personal job favors?   Which Harman is testily denying at this point. 

Jeff Stein, however, says he has three separate sources who corroborate his piece. Having spent the last few years digging through any number of stories by a myriad of reporters, I have to say that Jeff is very careful in what he writes.  And having three sources with overlapping information?  Sounds pretty careful to me. 

Especially when Lewis & Mazzetti of NYTimes have confirmed with their own sources, who add some interesting details to the mix.  Including that Harman allegedly said she’d have more influence with an unnamed WH official.  And that the caller would have a big CA donor threaten to cut off funds to Nancy Pelosi if Harman didn’t get the intel chair. 

Note that the statement from Harman’s office fails to mention any WH or other official Bush/Cheney administration discussion, only a curt denial of DOJ contact:

Congresswoman Harman has never contacted the Justice Department about its prosecution of present or former Aipac employees.

Curiouser and curiouser.

But Harman also stands accused of screwing over the entire Democratic party — and the country — by stifling the NSA domestic wiretapping story before the 2004 election.

Imagine what serious problems that stifled NSA story could have caused for the Bush/Cheney re-election bid.  Along with raising serious issues for GOP candidates who were rubber-stamping Bush Administration policies.

Wonder who would have asked Harman to intervene? Possibilities are endless. (more…)

Girl in Herat, Afghanistan. via twocentsworth.

Female members of Congress are banding together ito shine light on women’s issues in Afghanistan:

Given what they perceive to be momentum for the cause, several lawmakers say they are ready to place social and economic developmental issues front and center in the debate on Afghanistan’s future.

“I think that if you empower women you literally crack down on terrorism,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who has done extensive work on the rights of women in Afghanistan.

“They are a big part of the solution [in Afghanistan]. When women are educated and have healthcare and a standing [in society], they are part of the solution in helping their country.”

GIving lip service to a long-standing problem, however, is just not enough.

In 2007, CNN aired a documentary report (YouTube) on women in Afghanistan that was emotionally searing as much as it was starkly informative. In Lifting the Veil, CNN reporter Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy reported on the ongoing plight of young girls in Afghanistan:

These girls have had a very difficult upbringing. They have hopes and dreams they want to go to school, they want to be able to work when they grow up, but they don’t have any money and barely enough to make ends meet and have no money to buy notebooks and it’s very difficult for them to see their mother go out and beg.

(voice-over): They say that nothing has changed for them, that they hoped that the government would help them, but their life seems to have been exactly the way it was before.

And in the past weeks?  This is just the latest blow for women’s rights there:

The law – which has not yet been published but was leaked by a UN agency – rules that a Shiite woman must seek her husband’s permission to go outside.

"Obedience, readiness for intercourse and not leaving the house without the permission of the husband are the duties of the wife," states the law.

"As long as the husband is not traveling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night," it says. (more…)

Ray Suarez is one of my favorite working journalists. His pieces hit not just the factually meaty and difficult questions that need to be asked, but the heart and gut level issues that need to be exposed to the community as a whole. He did a piece yesterday on HIV/AIDS orphans in South Africa that nearly ripped out my heart.

Uber-neoconman Richard Perle yesterday in DC: In real life, Perle was the ideological architect of the Iraq war and of the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack. But at yesterday’s forum of foreign policy intellectuals, he created a fantastic world in which: 1. Perle is not a neoconservative. 2. Neoconservatives do not exist. 3. Even if neoconservatives did exist, they certainly couldn’t be blamed for the disasters of the past eight years. “There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy,” Perle informed the gathering, hosted by National Interest magazine. “It is a left critique of what is believed by the commentator to be a right-wing policy.”

Ready yourself for the shrieks, the cries, the dittohead fury…the wingnut run on Depends: Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told Congress today that instability in countries around the world caused by the current global economic crisis rather than terrorism is the primary near-term security threat to the United States….Blair also raised the specter of the “high levels of violent extremism” in the turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s along with “regime-threatening instability” if the economic crisis persists over a one- to two-year period.