I see no hope. They will stop at nothing and are so well coordinated and in perfect lockstep with one another (including the Republican media) that they can get away with just about anything. They are the new Macchiavelians, and Little Boy Bush is Il Principe. I’ve never been so depressed about US politics before, and I’m afraid we have little choice but to resign ourselves to more of the same, and worse, for years and years to come.

I am watching the hatchet job performed now on Dean and Clark, and it is simply beyond all belief. It reminds me of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, where a populist governor and his cronies ride roughshod over the law and basically do and say as they please, unchecked and unquestioned. The more passionate Dean and Clark become, the more they’re ridiculed as “angry” and “incoherent” and “contradictory.” And the Republicans, in a dazzling display of unity and choreography, loom godlike over the political landscape, as bright and shiny as Mussolini’s well-polished black boots.

I plan to go home within ten weeks. Will I be returning to the America I left in 2000? Will I really want to live there again. Rhetorical questions, for now. I’ll go back with as open a mind as possible, but looking at where Bush-Cheney are leading us today, it’s hard to be sanguine.

This site is quite amazing. Some great photographs chronicling 50 years of Chinese history, plus some astute essays by the photographers.

I doubt if petitions such as this can make any difference, considering what we are up against, but sometimes it’s good just to know that we have done something, whatever we can, to speak out against a fundamental wrong. Even if you don’t want to bother signing it, please take a moment to read it. It’s very moving, and very sad.

Joseph of The LongBow Papers has a thought-provoking post on how Paul O’Neill’s recent revelations confirm every liberal’s worst fears, namely that Dick Cheney is the man behind the curtain. He truly is, as Joseph says, America’s “Czar.”

The really scary thing, however, is that Dick Cheney’s ticker is notoriously unreliable. Let’s hope he takes his pills, cuts down on saturated fats and gets plenty of exercize. After all, George W. Bush is only a heartbeat away from the presidency. Terrifying.

Maybe their tagline should be, “Put a monkey in your underpants.” I’m really not making this up:

Women in Singapore are buying their husbands special Chinese New Year briefs, hoping to bring them good fortune and increase their sexual potency.

Women are also buying themselves “Funky Monkey” panties specially designed for the year of the monkey, featuring smiling cartoon primates. The Lunar New Year begins on Jan. 22 and is celebrated by the Chinese diaspora around the globe.

But the most popular style is bright red briefs for men featuring Chinese characters for wealth and prosperity, said Jeannette Cheong, owner of the underwear store ButtOn Trendy Undies.

UPDATE: Here’s the only photo I can find.

I’m all for improving a Web site’s look and feel periodically, but I can’t say that I love the new look over at Living in China.

My main criticism is that, at least on my monitor, the aggregator is no longer visible, so a first-time visitor may not even know there is an aggregator. They would have to scroll down, but even then, it is now much less prominent, buried under the search feature and the quote-of-the-day without its own copy box as before, looking scrunched and dark. It was so cool when the the photo of the week was up high, followed right away by the aggregator, which is the lifeblood of the site.

Oh well, they didn’t ask me to design it (and visually I’m so helpless I had to pay somebody to design my own site). Hopefully they’re still experimenting.

Nicholas writes a funny, incisive Sinagpore blog that may not be for everyone (it has a strong focus on the literary). I’ve been enjoying it lately, and his posts and the ensuing comments re. another prominent Singapore blog, Xiaxue, are quite hilarious.

Sounds that way:

A new strain of the Sars virus that has emerged in southern China appears to be less contagious than the strain that killed nearly 800 people worldwide last year, a Hong Kong scientist said yesterday.

The present strain does not appear to be as well adapted to infecting humans as the one last year, said Dr Guan Yi, a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong and a leading expert on the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) virus.

‘The virus this year is a new virus strain. It behaves like a virus in an animal and is not well adapted to humans, so its transmission ability among humans is low,’ said Dr Guan. ‘That is why contacts of these victims in China have not been infected.’

I wrote a little piece over at Living in China giving thanks to two members of the LiC community who went way out of their way to help a friend of mine in Beijing. Short, saccharine, but totally heartfelt.

Why didn’t I get it? It’s so obvious:

The sources said Bush aides also view the initiative as a huge jobs program, and one that will stimulate business in the many parts of the country where space and military contractors are located.

“This is a boon for business and a boon for Texas,” one official said, referring to the state where Bush was governor and the location of the Johnson Space Center, which is the home of mission control and the nerve center for human space flight.

The decision was controversial within the White House, with some aides arguing that it would make more sense to focus immediately on Mars, since humans have already landed on the moon and a Mars mission would build cleanly on the success of Spirit, the U.S. rover that landed safely on Mars last weekend. Bush himself settled the divisions, according to the sources, working from options that had been narrowed down by his senior adviser, Karl Rove.

One presidential adviser, who asked not to be identified, said, after discussing the initiative with administration officials, that the idea is “crazy” and mocked it as the “mission to Pluto.”

“It costs a lot of money and we don’t have money,” the official said. “This is destructive of any sort of budget restraint.”

Via Daniel Drezner, and thanks to Conrad for leading me to him.