Wikileaks: US ambassador says Koreans "behaving irrationally" on Tokto

And they "may do something crazy"! So said the US ambassador to Japan, in 2006.

From the Wikileaks site itself:

Classified By: Ambassador J. Thomas Schieffer. Reason: 1.4 (b)(d).

¶1. (S) At 11:00 a.m. on April 20, the Ambassador spoke
with VFM Yachi, at Yachi's request, regarding simmering
tensions between Japan and the ROK over a planned Japanese
maritime survey near the disputed Liancourt Rocks (reftel).
He explained, briefly, that the ROK intended to propose to an
international commission in June that features on the bottom
of the sea in the disputed area be given Korean names. Japan
wants to survey the area in order to make a counter-proposal
at the meeting. Korea, Yachi stated, may use force to block
the survey ship. Yachi further noted that he might travel to
Seoul the following day, April 21, to try to resolve the
matter peacefully.

¶2. (S) The Ambassador stated the United States understands
that Japan is within its rights under international law. The
Koreans are behaving irrationally, and the United States is
concerned that they may do something crazy, causing a major
problem. Everyone needs to back off, he stressed, to enable
the matter to be resolved peacefully. We do not want our two
allies shooting at each other, he asserted. The Ambassador
advised that he might get in touch with FM Aso later in the
day.

¶3. (C) Yachi thanked the Ambassador for his concern and
said he would do his best. He requested that the Ambassador
send an Embassy representative to the Foreign Ministry to
hear Japan's position on the issue.
SCHIEFFER

I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall during that conversation. While I think that South Korea in 2005 and 2006 did collectively need to just chill despite noise made by Tokyo over the islets long claimed by Korea and firmly in South Korea's hands for over half a century, I think Japan was out of line for trying to conduct such a survey in what are essentially territorial waters of the Republic of Korea or the EEZ that they generate. South Korea had no choice but to react with a show of force.

Korea is not "crazy" or "irrational" for being adamantly opposed to the Japanese attempt, and it's most unfortunate that the then-newbie US ambassador to Japan would editorialize as much. I seriously doubt the good Ambassador John Schieffer to Japan had any more direct knowledge or informed clue of what the South Korean side might do than anyone reading K-blogs back in 2005 and 2006.

I note that, five years later, no such "crazy" thing has happened from the Seoul side to bear that out.

...

Republicans, warped time, and the "Year Zero" gambit

Quick quiz: How long has Obama been president?

If you're too lazy to calculate it in your head, at least think about whether it's closer to two years or three. Go on, I'll wait. I've got Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica on Netflix instant-view.

Answer: As of two Sundays ago when I started writing this, Barack Hussein Obama had been our president for two years, four months, three weeks, and two days. Slightly over 2-1/3 years. Not even past the 2-1/2 mark you would need to hit in order to round up all the way to three years. Well over half a year shy of three years.

But if you're a Republican operative trying to pull the wool over the public's eyes, you might be used to saying that Barack Hussein Obama has been at the helm for three years. As evidence, look at a speech given by former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty:

Speaking yesterday at the University of Chicago, where Obama once taught law, Pawlenty said Obama has “spent three years dividing our nation and fanning the flames of class envy and resentment all across the country to deflect attention from his own failures and the economic hardship they have visited on America.”

Well, at first I thought that one was not as clear: after all, he could have been counting the months on the campaign trail, but at that time it was the prior administration trying to "deflect attention from his own failures and the economic hardship they have visited on America."

This is becoming a clear pattern from Republicans. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the supposed Republican frontrunner, did the same thing during the recent Republican debate:

When he took office his number one job was to get the economy to turn around...so now, three years later, we have high unemployment...we still have, three years later, home foreclosures at record levels...and what does he have to say about this? He says "I'm just getting started."

On NBC's Meet the Press (15:30), the Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus posed to voters the question "whether or not people believe that they're better off today than they were three or four years ago."

Excuse me? "Three or four years ago"?

Four years ago we were about midway into the second term of one George W. Bush. Three years ago we had not yet witnessed the meltdown of our economy that occurred on Mr Bush's watch.

But it's easy to see what Republicans are trying to do with Americans who are lazily calculating backward from 2011 and getting to 2008, even though Obama did not become president until the end of January 2009.

Leapfrogging backward to a time when things had not yet fallen apart, in order to pin the entire mess on Obama, is absurd. But it might just gain some votes from the amnesia-stricken.

Of course, that's not the only reason for warping time: by making people think Obama has been in office longer than he has, it makes it seem more more like he is a failure for not having solved the economic mess already. That is, at two years or so, he may legitimately be getting the ball rolling on fixing an economic disaster that was many more years in the making, but at three or four years, we should be seeing far better numbers, right?

This kind of dishonesty makes me think I cannot support whatever candidate uses this tactic.

See, the whole purpose of the Year Zero tactic is that Republicans don't want you to think about how we got from surplus spending at the end of the Clinton administration to the astronomical deficit spending we're at now. They want you to think this all began with Obama and that the deficit is all the responsibility of the Democrats instead of breaking down to $10 trillion from Republican administrations and a mere $4 trillion from Democrats (mostly Obama, owing to the problems and the budget he inherited from Bush43).

And if you do recall that the economy was at the abyss before Obama became president, you should be thinking that any of the Republicans would have fixed it all by now. The Republicans are banking on the voters forgetting just how dangerously close we were to Great Depression 2.0 so that they will believe the lingering problems are because of Obama's policies and not his predecessors'.

It's a powerful strategy, banking on voter amnesia, and I think that the only way Obama can win is with stronger numbers (and indications are they will get better, despite this past month's blip of only 55K jobs created) and driving home just how bad things were when he became president in 2009.

This may involve bringing up things from his opponents' past. This shouldn't be too hard; in the June 13 broadcast of Meet the Press (7:25), host David Gregory trotted out something Mr Santorum had said way back in December 2002:

I think we're going to be in for deficits for the next few years to come. We're in a recession — just coming out of a recession — and secondly we're going to be fighting a war, a major war on terrorism, and potentially a war in Iraq. The last thing we need to do when we're concerned about national security of this country is be concerned about deficits.

Whoa. Quite a gotcha moment there. But wait, it's all different this time. When the host asks why, in the same circumstances (recession, two wars, etc.), deficits didn't matter then but they do now, Mr Santorum meekly responds, "Well, I think scale matters... Prior to 2001, we were in a surplus. We were talking about deficits of a hundred to two hundred billion dollars, not $1.5 trillion, not something that is grinding our economy down."

He goes on to explain that this was "immediately" right after we were attacked (time warp problem again, as this was over a year after the attacks that he was saying that). But in the spirit of the Year Zero gambit, what he neglects to explain was how we ended up with some $6 trillion in debt from that administration.

Just where the hell were all these budget hawks? Why did they not suddenly appear until 2009? With a successful Year Zero gambit, you won't have to think about that.

And this is part of that other great meme — that Obama is at heart the cause of the astronomical national debt — that also is getting play among Republicans. From the first Santorum link, at about 4:10 in this link, he says:

Sure, he came in with a problem, and in that whole he kept digging. And digging And digging.

Now for every dollar we spend, thanks to this president, forty cents is borrowed. Forty cents is gonna be put on every man, woman, and child, to pay the interest on for the rest of their lives. ...

Who are you, Mr. President? Who are you, Mr. President, to say that you and your administration should take forty cents out of every dollar and borrow it from future generations to prop you up?

Wow. Just wow. Listening to that you'd get the impression that it was Obama himself who ran up the $14 trillion and that $10 trillion of it wasn't actually from Republican administrations.

No wonder Santorum and his supporters say "President Obama... wrecked our economy."

UPDATE:
Representative Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party favorite also running for president, is riding the three-year meme:

In February 2009, President Obama was very confident that his economic policies would turn the country around within a year. He said -- and I quote -- "A year from now, I think people are going to see that we're starting to make some progress. If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition."

Well, Mr. President, your policies haven't worked. Spending our way out of the recession hasn't worked. And, so, Mr. President, we take you at your word.

Well, at least she got the timeline sorta right. Except the three-year mark would be sometime early next year. At least this comment is more defensible than the other comments, as one cannot expect everything to be resolved by January 20, 2012. But if things are clearly going in an upward direction, people who are confident things are getting better and who remember how bad things actually had gotten may just vote again for Barack Hussein Obama.

Koreanization of America, Florida and California edition

Okay, I'm not really saying that these places are becoming Koreanized or that Korea is actually exerting more influence. Rather, this is a term I like to use when something happens in America (or elsewhere) that Korea bashers and naysayers had characterized as unique to Korea (OINK: only in Korea), typically something that "would never happen in the US."

Alternatively, it can include things that have happened in America (or Canada, etc.) but, were they to happen in Korea, the commentariat in the K-blogosphere peanut gallery would be all over it as racist, nationalist, jingoist, backwards, etc.

The first is a "skirmish" that occurred in the California State Assembly. And while it can't possibly compare to the furniture-breaking, skull-cracking donnybrooks that have broken out in the halls of power in Seoul (or Taipei), that it happens at all in Sacramento is a bit shocking.

From the Los Angeles Times:

It all began when Assemblyman Don Wagner (R-Irvine) likened a portion of the Democrats’ budget plan, a plan to eliminate redevelopment agencies, to a “Tony Soprano” insurance scheme.

Assemblyman Anthony Portantino (D-La Cañada Flintridge) quickly rose to say that “as a proud Italian American, I resent that and I would respectfully ask the commenter to make an apology to Italian Americans in California."

Wagner retorted, “I will apologize to any Italian Americans who are not in the Mafia and engaged in insurance scams,” to audible murmurs and grumbling in the chamber.

Then Wagner rose again. "My apology, if one is needed, is sincere," he said. "My reference is certainly not one that no one in this room gets… I think my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, especially one who seems to be extraordinarily outraged over this for reasons I don't understand -- my reference is not lost on anyone here. This is not an attack on anyone. This bill is a bait and switch."

Moments later, Assemblyman Warren Furutani (D-Gardena), who is not Italian American, hustled over to confront Wagner and the two had to be separated by colleagues.

I found the part in bold somewhat amusing. I suppose, though, that some people without much exposure to Japanese surnames or who'd never driven through Gardena might assume a person named Furutani could be a paisano. For a long time I assumed Marisa Tomei was part Japanese.

There's video, but they only show very little of what happened (the stuff that causes offense starts around 2:45, with the brouhaha around 5:30). The cameras were focused on Sate Assembly Speaker Pro Tempore Fiona Ma, who's kind of a looker. A real MILF, as in Ma I'd Like to be Friends with.



And next we go from Ca. to Fla. It seems one sports writer for the Orlando Sentinel who is perturbed about furriners winning American golf tourneys:

Asking who is going to win this golf tournament is like asking who is going win the national spelling bee. Actually, it’s even more difficult because at least you know the spelling bee winner is going to be American. These days, golf majors are ruled by players from lands far, far away.

Tiger Woods is off fighting the battle of wounded knee while Phil Mickelson is flying so far under the radar he is scraping the tree tops. And when he’s not scraping the tree tops, he’ll likely be hitting his golf ball into tree trunks.

But wait, there is hope for the red, white and blue. South Korean K.J. Choi, who was just granted American citizenship, will win this tournament. And then U.S. golf will be like many other products Americans enjoy: “Made in Korea.”

Of course, the American golf establishment isn't exactly the most international-thinking group you ever saw, so I shouldn't be surprised at the sentiment. But just imagine this were switched to the Korea Open and it was likely to be won by Americans who are starting to dominate golf, and just picture the reams of comments at, say, The Marmot's Hole, about how this is symptomatic of Korea's deep-seated xenophobia.

Golf is a Scottish game
dominated by Koreans
living in America

They'd also get on the case of the reporter for calling the newly minted South Korean, in our hypothetical role reversal, an American.

I should, perhaps, take my own advice and not get too worked up over a hypothetical that hasn't actually happened (yet).

I have issues!... I'm Korean!

And that's the story of half the people I know. [rimshot]

Um, anyway, here's the political ad at the center of one of the first pander bear sightings of the new political season:



The ad is funny for its SNL-parody-style quality to it. But the more you watch it, the more, well, unfunny it becomes. It's pandering to minorities ("My wife is Korean!") instead of addressing issues that may face them. The guy's would-be district is 15% Asian... okay, so what does that mean exactly?

Anyway, what's even more sorta-borderline-offensive about it is that they seem to have taken their casting/ambience clues from CSI:Koreantown, what with the guy whose street cred isn't enough just looking Asian and having an Asian woman hanging onto him... instead he has to show how Asian he truly is by having his Kanji tats visible with his unbuttoned shirt. Because Chinese character tattoos are de rigueur for Hollywood-style representations. (I certainly hope his Robert Park-style long hair doesn't become a thing. That 'do is a don't.)

And of course the woman runs a dry cleaners. God forbid a Korean immigrant might be depicted as a retiree or a church secretary or something normal that lots of "I'm a Korean"s do.

This is being discussed over at The Marmot's Hole and ROK Drop, where some have questioned whether the "I'm a Korean" ajumma is really Korean, being as how her hair was not permed into a spherical brillo pad monstrosity.

Perhaps they've been thrown off by the kyopo pensioner not being acted by June Kyoko Lu...


... who portrays 82.6% of all depictions of Korean ajumma or halmŏni on television and film. It's in her contract.

A few also suggested that had Republicans run this ad, the Dems would be all over it. Well, the left (as represented by the Huffington Post) thought it was pretty wrong and "borderline racist." Someone from thinkprogress.org was "stunned into speechlessness."

At any rate, this mensch probably did exactly what he set out to do: Dan Adler got people talking about his campaign where he was running #3. We'll have to wait for the primary on May 17 to see if there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

Anyway, a HT to Wangkon. He alerted me to this well before it became a national meme, at which time I would have blogged it and given him credit, but Blogger was clogger at the time.

LAT confirms what we've been saying all along about the FTA

The Republican surge will make ratification of the KORUS FTA more likely (assuming Obama supports it as much as he says he does).

From the Los Angeles Times:

The wide differences between Republicans and Democrats on economic policy don't leave much room for compromise over the next two years. But Tuesday's takeover of the House of Representatives by the GOP raises hopes for progress on at least one important initiative: It might help President Obama win approval of a U.S.- South Korea free-trade pact.

President George W. Bush was a big proponent of the bilateral agreement with South Korea, which both governments signed in 2007, but he couldn't persuade Congress to approve it. Obama seems an unlikely champion, especially since he criticized the deal during his 2008 presidential campaign. But rather than kill the pact, he's working to renegotiate it. In June, Obama promised South Korean President Lee Myung-bak that he would revive the stalled trade talks in hopes of producing a mutually agreeable deal by Nov. 11, when Obama will travel to Seoul for the G-20 economic summit.

Obama evidently hopes to appease U.S. automakers who think the existing pact does too little to open the South Korean market to American cars, and ranchers who fret about South Korean restrictions on beef imports. Tweaking the pact to accommodate them shouldn't pose an excessive challenge, but it's improbable that U.S. labor unions will ever support the deal — and where organized labor leads, the Democratic Party tends to follow.

Indeed, Obama's Korea-bashing (and Japan-bashing) over the FTA and his repetition of "the Big Lie" led me to withhold my vote for him in 2008.

Anyway, the article is critical of the union view:

Union fears that lower trade barriers will prompt a loss of American jobs not only ignore the job growth that can be expected as South Korean consumers buy more American products, but the positive (and job-producing) economic impacts of lower prices for South Korean goods in the United States. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, the pact would boost U.S. gross domestic product by up to $12 billion a year.

It will be nice to see this thing finally ratified. Obama only needs a few Democratic senators to cross the aisle and vote yes with the Republicans. I would think the two California senators would be among them, but I'm not sure. And for Obama, the earlier the better. The further back in people's memory ratification is, the less the unionists will be angry enough in 2012 to withhold their support, and the sooner it passes the sooner the positive effects will come to pass.

It's official: Potheads forgot to vote to make marijuana legal

Proposition 19, the voter initiative that would have legalized and regulated marijuana production and consumption in much the same way that alcohol is, was defeated on Tuesday, 54 to 46 percent. [Interestingly, a failed ballot initiative on the November 1972 ballot which would have removed penalties for personal use of marijuana, was also called Proposition 19; it was defeated almost exactly 2 to 1.]

Yet surveys show not only that those who support legalization outnumber those who are against it (49 to 41 percent), but also that if the young people who overwhelmingly support legalization had come out in numbers similar to what they did in the 2008 election, Prop 19 could have become law and we could all have a toke and a smile.

From the Los Angeles Times:

California voters rejected Prop. 19, but a post-election poll found that they still lean toward legalizing marijuana for recreational use and, if young voters had turned out as heavily on Tuesday as they do for presidential elections, the result would have been a close call.

Okay, to be fair, Prop 19 was flawed in some ways, such that it may be better to fix it up a bit and try again in November 2012:

The poll also found that a quarter of those who voted on Proposition 19 had considered voting the other way, suggesting that a different initiative or a different campaign could change the result.

“We have fluidity,” Greenberg said. “The issue does not have the kind of hard and fast kind of polarization that we’ve seen with other so-called moral or social issues.”

We from California need to stop pussy-footing around the issue, turning it into an infraction but still keeping it illegal in a way that still funnels billions of dollars to drug cartels and their own campaigns of violence. Now there's your drug crime.

Ford comes out swinging against the FTA with nationally run ad

[source]

I myself haven't see it yet (and I'm trying to track it down), but Ford Motor Company put an ad in twenty papers across the US aimed at turning the public against the ROK-US free trade agreement (aka KORUS FTA) which now stands a much better chance of passing now that the Democrats in Congress took a "shellacking."

Here is NPR's description of the ad:

We were struck by an advertisement we saw today in The Washington Post. The full-page ad shows a sea of red cars and one lone blue car, along with this text: For every 52 cars Korea ships here, the U.S. can only export one there.

Ford paid for the ad, and it appears today in more than 20 newspapers. So we wondered what it's all about. It turns out it relates to the Korean Free Trade Agreement.

And being NPR, they tried to determine the ad's veracity by talking with Marcus Noland:

NORRIS: Now, speaking of the concerns of the auto industry, is this ad or is the contention made in this ad actually correct? Is Ford or are other American auto companies at a disadvantage because of this free trade agreement?

Mr. NOLAND: No, actually not. Historically, the Korean market has been inhospitable to foreign producers. There's no question about that. Though considerable liberalization has occurred in recent years and, indeed, I was just in Korea last week, and I was surprised by how many non-Korean cars I saw on the road.

The other thing is is that GM, the largest American car manufacturer, actually owns a Korean car company, Daewoo. So it doesn't ship cars from the United States to Korea. It simply manufactures them and sells them in Korea. So when Ford points to its inability to literally export cars from here to Korea, this is really more of a Ford issue than an American automobile sector issue.

I'll try to hit the library and track down the dead-tree edition of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times. More on this when I'm not in class.

UPDATE:
At The Marmot's Hole, Wangkon has put up a pretty good piece on this (with a lot more links) with an interesting comments section. He didn't give me a hat tip, though, even though mine was up hours before his, sitting right there in the TMH Blog Feed.

UPDATE 2:
Would South Koreans buy a Ford F150?

iheartblueballs on the "myth" of cutting taxes to increase revenues

iheartblueballs apparently hates my guts, but God bless the guy for really doing his homework and laying out some thoughtful (if expletive-ridden) essays on issues near and dear to this left-of-center Democratic voter.

Case in point, about the claims made mentioned in the above title:

So confident, so condescending, and so embarrassingly fucking wrong. I always have a good chuckle whenever I hear conservatives repeat this myth — and they repeat it a lot — because they inevitably fail to provide any statistical data to prove it. They’ll offer JFK quotes or isolated data from a few year period.

The reason for this is actually very simple. There is no comprehensive statistical data to prove that tax cuts increase revenues. In fact, all available data points in the opposite direction.

He then links to a worthwhile National Review article on the subject, while adding his own relevant points. He ends with this snarky attack on the true-believer conservatives who now have the reins of power in the House of Representatives:

I’ll go ahead and make a prediction: Plenty of conservatives who believe this myth will read the article I linked to, and because it’s in the NR they’ll have a hard time claiming bias or writing it off as liberal. And then they’ll go about ignoring it because it doesn’t fit the myth they’ve held so dear for so long. They’ll probably hit the google and search for some definitive data supporting their mythical claim, but they won’t find any, because there isn’t any.

None of this will matter. The myth will continue to perpetuate, because Rush repeats it, and Hannity repeats it, and all kinds of ignorant conservative politicians keep repeating it over and over and over until all the dupes are sold.

And hey, let’s not pretend the dupes actually care about statistical data or proof. They want to believe and they want to be sold, and that makes the selling all that much easier.

Sugo haessŏyo, IHBB. I just wish you'd change your ballsy avatar so I can read your comments while out in public.

How did they get it so wrong on Reid?

I'm not going to make the case that Senator Harry Reid of Nevada is well-liked, but the pre-Tuesday polling obits of the Senate Majority Leader have taken on an almost "Dewey Defeats Truman" air, even though the guy who was down by three just yesterday went on to win by five percentage points.

This Esquire article — which was written before Tuesday but whose predictions were borne out — may explain what the problem was:

Second, counter to all of the public polls, the internal Reid numbers for the past three weeks show that Reid has actually had a lead ranging from 4 to 8 points (and last week, the National Republican Senate Campaign Committee had a similar internal poll showing Reid six points up). The campaign's rolling-track numbers from last Friday also showed Senator Reid with a six-point lead.

Why are these numbers so different from Rasmussen, Mason-Dixon, et al? Well, first and foremost, Nevada is unlike any other state, in that it has a comparatively transient population, with lots of newcomers, and a sizeable percentage of that population works in the gaming industry — the casinos. Traditional polling firms don't call during the day, and so you miss most of those people, who work in significant numbers at night. And if there was ever a population that communicated with the world exclusively via cell phones as opposed to landlines, this is it. (The Reid campaign has polled cell-phone users aggressively.) The research shows that when you go strictly by the people who you reach on the first try, Reid is 2 points down. But in the subset of people who you reach on the second or third try, Reid leads by 11 points.

None of the public polls reflect this population at all.

There's a bit more to it than that, but this could be one of those cases that could change the face of polling in the future.

Feel-good election day story

Today is a state holiday in Hawaii. Its day-off status isn't that important to me because I voted absentee ballot — in California — and I only have one class on Tuesday anyway. But it does means you can park almost anywhere.

Instead of sifting through the news of Jerry Brown's future Jeopardy™ question status as simultaneously modern-day California's youngest and oldest ever elected governor, Prop 19 marijuana legalization's likely defeat, the worst thumping the Democrats have gotten in the House sine 1948 while simultaneously holding onto the Senate (with Harry Reid still eligible to be the Majority Leader), the nail-biter between Colleen Hanabusa and Charles Djou here in Hawaii-1, or any of that, I thought I'd present a touching story of a first-time voter.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Reginalda Rodriguez filled out her ballot with painstaking care, using her practice booklet as a guide -- no on Prop. 19, Jerry Brown for governor, and on through every measure and candidate.

It was the first time the 87-year-old great-grandmother of 11 had voted in the United States. She lived the first 65 years of her life in El Salvador. In 1989, she came to live with her son in Los Angeles to escape the civil war in her country. She worked as a nanny until the age of 83.

In May 2008, she finally became a U.S. citizen. When Rodriguez arrived at the Baldwin Hills Recreation Center polling place Tuesday afternoon, the workers were unable to find her name on the rolls.

Undiscouraged, she cast her provisional ballot. On the way out, she hugged the workers or shook their hands. "I feel very satisfied, because I have so much esteem for this country," Rodriguez said in Spanish. "I love this country very much."

There was no single proposition or race that drew her. Rodriguez said she simply wanted to vote in the country where she is now a citizen.

[sniff] No matter where you stand on so-called "multi-culturalism" or how you choose to define it, America needs more immigrants to be like Ms Rodriguez, at least in this regard. Here's hoping for many more elections in your future, ma'am.

As for those other topics, I'll have a post-election postmortem later this week. For now, I'll say that House Democrats (and a few Senate Democrats) sacrificed their careers for a very good cause, something that will be increasingly clear long after you would have retired even if you had stayed in office. In the meantime, the Dems should see this as an opportunity to seek a new leader in the House that is less of a lightning rod and more of a hands-across-the-aisle kinda person.

Perhaps consider doing the same thing in the Senate, even if Harry Reid has retained his seat (and by a bigger margin than polls had predicted since, um, they had predicted he'd lose by about three instead of winning by five points).

This is a chance for Obama to reach out and try to do some things that show he can be bipartisan, like on passing the KORUS FTA with those six or so extra Republican Senators.

Rally to Restore Sanity Honolulu

It technically hasn't begun yet, but there's not a great turnout here in Oahu. Not the hundreds of thousands (?) they got in Washington DC, but there are about a hundred or so people sitting in the shade ("today it's sunny with a chance of SANE," says this rally's FB page). I think most of them are not homeless.

For now we're just hanging out by the Korean War Memorial. Aimé Césaire will have to wait.

By the way, that's Hawaii's state capitol in the background, the only capitol uglier than that thing at Yôûido.

UPDATE:
Every haole in Honolulu is here. It started Hawaii-style (i.e., thirty minutes late) but there are now loads of people. So if you were thinking you shouldn't come 'cuz kushibo was fussing the whole thing, don't listen to me. No one should ever, ever, ever take anything I say seriously.

Random photos around eastern Honolulu

An iPhone, not just the iPhone4 but also the iPhone 3G and 3Gs, makes for a pretty good stand-in for a regular camera, especially in bright light. For better or worse, it has made me lazy about carrying around my Nikon when I want to do street photography (which is not necessarily pictures of actual streets).

It's also easier to hold an iPhone in such a way that it looks like you're not actually taking a picture of your subject than it is to do the same with an SLR. That is, if you're inclined toward that kind of photography where people who had the misfortune to walk near you in some "fashionable" part of Seoul unknowingly end up on the "fashion blog" you do instead of actually working on the PhD you tell everyone you practically already have.

Anyway, my pictures are more toward social comment or memorabilia, not aesthetic structure. No one's forcing you to look.

 "Stupid is Fearless." "Be Stupid." Quasi-PLO ski masks. This just begs comment, but I won't, since that's what they want.

Note not just the well-maintained VW bus, but also the "Hawaiian Kingdom" license plate (click once or twice to fully enlarge). The subtext here is Native Hawaiian nationalism and anti-colonialism. Frankly, I have no idea if this is a legally recognized license plate, but if you read up on the Akaka Bill, you might get some idea.

This is Waialae Avenue, a street I walk up and down quite often. There's something pleasant about the urban environment on this side of Honolulu that I just like. Very little trash, older well-maintained buildings, beautiful clouds and friendly people. I frequently end up at this street corner on the way to McDonald's...

... where Monopoly is back!™ Yep, I play, and I have been well-rewarded with fries, Cokes, McFlurries, and other goodies.

This is just half a block Ewa (westward) of the McDonald's. I pass this nearly every day, but I have no idea what this shop is. But it makes me want to sign a lease and open up a coffee shop full or retro Korean paraphernalia.

Note the old homes nearby. Were it in Seoul, Pusan, or just about any other metropolitan area in Korea, this would be a neighborhood in danger of being razed to make room for mid-rise apartments.

These campaign posters are for Dan Inouye (running for his ninth term in the US Senate) and Colleen Hanabusa (running to reclaim the Hawaii-1 US House seat for the Democrats). [The school right behind the posters was, I believe, the school attended by Jack Shephard's son in the flash-sideways episodes of Season 6.]

The beloved and respected Senator Inouye is considered such a shoo-in that the eighty-six-year-old, who is the longest-serving member of the US Senate since Senator Byrd of West Virginia died, has hardly been running any campaign whatsoever. So devoid of any campaign signage is this city that for a while there I didn't even realize he was up for re-election this year.

Ms Hanabusa, on the other hand, is having a tough time unseating her former opponent, Republican Congressman Charles Djou, who won the seat with a plurality because the two Democrats (one of whom was Ms Hanabusa) couldn't get their act together. It was a special election with no party primary, scheduled to fill the seat after Neil Abercrombie vacated it to run for Hawaii governor. (I shook his hand today at a campaign event that focused on educational issues; I didn't have the heart to tell the septuagenarian professor that this year I voted in California instead.)

Hawaii voters apparently don't like to vote out incumbents, which is what Mr Djou now is. That's why, even though this is a firmly blue state where Obama got nearly three-quarters of the votes in 2008, Republican candidate Djou is in a dead heat with Democratic candidate Hanabusa.

Today in stupidity

• On an upcoming visit to India, US President Barack Hussein Obama won't be visiting a famed Sikh temple because the head covering he'd be required to wear might stoke rumors he's a Muslim.
  
  Again, the elitist Obama is treating the American people like they're stupid, as if they can't tell the difference between Sikhs and Muslims. (Oh, by the way, I'm being sarcastic.)

• The Republican candidate for Delaware's US Senate seat, Christine O'Donnell asked "Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” After being told it was the First Amendment that bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O’Donnell replied with (faux?) incredulity, "You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?"
  
  Clearly the First Amendment, which bars Congress from making "law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," contains the principle of "separation of church and state. But it appears she was going with the notion that the First Amendment does not contain the actual wording "separation of church and state." From various right-wing sites I've read, this is a popular notion aimed at demonstrating how liberal interpretation of the Constitution has led the country down a God-hating path. They note also that the Constitution does not contain the word "privacy" nor does it say anything about abortion.
  
  But if that's what she was going for, then she tripped up on her own wording. She should have asked, "Where in the Constitution are the words 'separation of church and state'?" Because the principle is right there, even if that phrasing is just shorthand for it. I guess this disconnect is why so many people think nothing of the government blocking a mosque or Muslim prayer center where a mainstream church or synagogue would be allowed.

• Sarah Palin was warning her supporters not to get complacent, telling them by tweet not to "party like it's 1773 just yet." Assuming that that date was yet another brain fart on the part of would-be Republican candidate for the presidency in 2012, the Daily Kos guy and PBS's Gwen Ifil (a Kushibo favorite) chided her for not remembering the year the Declaration of Independence was signed. What Ms Palin meant was that the eponymous Boston Tea Party occurred in 1773. Egg... on... faces.
  
  The Boston Tea Party, of course, was a major historical event in which local citizens who felt powerless tried to strike a blow against the perceived elite and forge a political force by scapegoating an unpopular ethnic minority. Much like today's Tea Party. (I kid! I kid! I kid because I love... to kid!)