Writing at the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker offers some frank insights about Glenn Beck:

Despite all the words spilled in evaluating Glenn Beck’s tent-less revival last weekend, the real meaning may have been hiding in plain sight. Beck’s “Restoring Honor” gathering on the Mall was right out of the Alcoholics Anonymous playbook. It was a 12-step program distilled to a few key words, all lifted from a prayer delivered from the Lincoln Memorial: healing, recovery and restoration.

Saturday’s Beckapalooza was yet another step in Beck’s own personal journey of recovery. He may as well have greeted the crowd of his fellow disaffected with: “Hi. My name is Glenn, and I’m messed up.” Beck’s history of alcoholism and addiction is familiar to any who follow him. He has made no secret of his past and is quick to make fun of himself. As he once said: “You can get rich making fun of me. I know. I’ve made a lot of money making fun of me.”

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Writing at the New York Review of Books blog page, Princeton professor Perry Link enumerates the seven deadly secrets that China’s octogenarians want to keep from the public at all cost. It makes an excellent list of potential dissertation topics for students of Chinese history and politics:

1. The famine during the Great Leap Forward in 1959-62. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died because of bad policy, not “bad weather.” What exactly happened? What policies caused the famine and what policies suppressed information on it? How much grain was in state granaries while people starved? Is it true that Mao sold grain to the Soviet Union during those years in order to buy nuclear weapons?

2. The death of Mao’s military commander General Lin Biao in 1971. The official version of events, which to this day exists only in bare outline, strains credulity: Mao’s “closet comrade in arms” suddenly plotted a coup, failed in it, tried to flee to the Soviet Union, and was shot down in his plane. What really happened? Why? Why shouldn’t we know more?

3. Mao’s will and personal lockbox. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing said at her trial (as part of the “Gang of Four”) that Mao had a written will that mentioned her. Did he? What did it say? Mao also apparently kept his own lockbox of “most core secrets” that, in his later years, not even Jiang Qing could see. Mao’s mistress Zhang Yufeng kept the key until September 21, 1976, twelve days after Mao’s death, when Hua Guofeng, Mao’s anointed successor, is said to have taken it from her. What’s in the box?

4. The Beijing Massacre of 1989. The basic story is fairly well known from The Tiananmen Papers, Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs, and Li Peng’s diary. But the records of some key meetings still are classified, and responsibility for the massacre remains an extremely sensitive question in Chinese politics.

5. The brutal suppression of the Falun Gong after 1999. Falun Gong claims there are concentration camps for their members and that internal organs of executed believers are surgically removed and sold. True? Untrue? What do the records say?

6. Beijing’s huge but secret “stability maintenance” budget. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences reports that Chinese government spending on domestic “stability maintenance”—the monitoring, intimidation, roughing-up, and illegal detention of petitioners, aggrieved workers, religious believers, professors, bloggers, twitterers, and other sources of “trouble”—now exceeds what the government spends in any category except the military. What are the details of this budget?

7. Bank accounts of Communist Party officials. Corruption and graft are widely viewed to be problems at every level of Chinese government, but exactly how much money have officials squirreled away? How much have they sent abroad?

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As a young lawyer, Obama represented a whistleblower; as a presidential candidate, he pledged to “strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government.” But as president, Obama has unleashed the most aggressive assault on whistleblowers Washington has ever seen—surpassing even George W. Bush. The latest example comes in a remarkable prosecution of Steven Kim, a well-known scholar of North Korea’s nuclear program.

Like most area experts at the top of the game, Kim does consulting for the State Department. He works for Lawrence Livermore Labs and was on secondment to the State Department at the time of the events in question. Now, however, Kim finds himself under indictment by the Justice Department. His crime? He spoke to Fox News about how the North Koreans were likely to react to proposed sanction measures. Former prosecutor and Johns Hopkins professor Ruth Wedgwood says that the Fox News report “contains completely unremarkable observations about what a country would do if it was sanctioned for its poor behavior. These kinds of observations were well known to anyone paying attention to public sources and ought not be the basis for making someone a federal felon.” I couldn’t agree more. [MORE . . .]

Two thousand seven hundred twenty-two days after U.S. troops crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq, U.S. combat operations there officially ended. Vice President Joseph Biden arrived to usher in ''Operation New Dawn,“ during which the nearly 50,000 American troops remaining in the country will still be available for combat missions when requested by Iraqi forces. Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for coordinated attacks in 13 towns and cities that killed at least 56 people, many of them members of the Iraqi police and security forces, calling the assaults ”the wings of victory sweeping again over a new day."^{1 2 3} General Ray Odierno, the outgoing U.S. commander in Iraq, said that the formation of a new government there could still be months away. “If we get the government formed, I think we’re okay,” Odierno said. “If we don’t, I don’t know.” ⁴ A gunman killed six people and wounded 14 in the Slovak capital of Bratislava.⁵ Five soldiers in Afghanistan were charged with forming a “kill team” to summarily execute random Afghan civilians, a college student recently returned from a month spent filming Marines in Afghanistan slashed a Muslim cab driver in New York, and General David Petraeus revealed that he is “an Enya guy.”^{6 7 8} [MORE . . .]

In a typically wry observation about revolutionaries, Joseph Conrad warns the observer not to be so attached to the romantic incendiaries, the “narrow-minded fanatics” who capture the headlines when the revolution breaks. The real test is who comes to power when the dust settles and order is reestablished, when “hopes [are] grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success.” Conrad would not be surprised by the latest developments in the Kyrgyz Republic, where a revolution broke out in early April, and the unrelenting struggle for power continues.

The streets of Bishkek are gripped with a dark foreboding, broken by brief glimmers of hope. There is a solid expectation that the elections to be held on October 10 will be free, fair, and democratic—the first in the history of the nation, or even the region, to genuinely warrant those labels. There is a vague hope these elections will produce a new, stable government, one that will break from the prior norm of democrats coming to power and quickly turning into authoritarian wannabes. Few will go so far as to call that an expectation, however. “We are witnessing the process of ‘lumpenizatsiya,’” one former president of the Kyrgyz bar, who had been aggressively critical of each of the prior governments, told me. When I asked what he meant by this curiously Marxist coinage, he explained, “It’s the process whereby the reins of government are seized by waves of people who are progressively less educated, less capable, and more brutish. Threats and intimidation take the place of moral suasion and law. Clan loyalties take the place of a sense of duty to the state.” In other words, a Hobbesian vision of the state in meltdown. [MORE . . .]

From the Dallas Morning News:

Longtime Dallas congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson has awarded thousands of dollars in college scholarships to four relatives and a top aide’s two children since 2005, using foundation funds set aside for black lawmakers’ causes.

The recipients were ineligible under anti-nepotism rules of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which provided the money. And all of the awards violated a foundation requirement that scholarship winners live or study in a caucus member’s district.

Johnson, a Democrat, denied any favoritism when asked about the scholarships last week. Two days later, she acknowledged in a statement released by her office that she had violated the rules but said she had done so “unknowingly” and would work with the foundation to “rectify the financial situation.”

It was the most expensive barbecue in all history, writes Berlin’s Tageszeitung today about a fete arranged by German Chancellor Angela Merkel for George W. Bush and his entourage in 2006.

On a warm summer evening four years ago, helicopters set down on the Trinwillershagen athletic field and one of the most powerful men of the world walked into the little village with 700 inhabitants. Chancellor Angela Merkel had invited George W. Bush to her home electoral district in Western Pomerania—she planned to offer him a hearty meal of barbecued wild boar and to send the world many harmonious photographs of the gathering. But hardly had the proprietor of the Gasthof zu den Linden removed the boar meat from the skewers when a controversy began in Germany about this “most expensive barbecue in history.” The event did not bring only politicians to Merkel’s constituency. A force of 12,225 policemen from throughout Germany were also deployed to provide security for the state visitors in the region between Rostock and Stralsund.

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Today’s Washington Post offers a follow-up to yesterday’s Times story about the senior Afghan national security official who is the target of a U.S. driven anti-corruption probe while being on the CIA’s payroll. It discloses that the CIA’s payroll covers Afghan government figures pretty extensively:

The CIA is making secret payments to multiple members of President Hamid Karzai’s administration, in part to maintain sources of information in a government in which the Afghan leader is often seen as having a limited grasp of developments, according to current and former U.S. officials. The payments are long-standing in many cases and designed to help the agency maintain a deep roster of allies within the presidential palace. Some aides function as CIA informants, but others collect stipends under more informal arrangements meant to ensure their accessibility, a U.S. official said.

The CIA has continued the payments despite concerns that it is backing corrupt officials and undermining efforts to wean Afghans’ dependence on secret sources of income and graft. The U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a significant number of officials in Karzai’s administration are on the payroll.

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The current issue of The National Interest contains Ahmed Rashid’s exhaustive and provocative essay on the current state of affairs in Pakistan. It’s a must-read for anyone trying to come to grips with American foreign policy in the “Af-Pak theater.” Rashid starts with Pakistan’s basket-case military, long viewed by Washington’s foreign policy elite as the glue that holds the country together:

There is perhaps no other political-military elite in the world whose aspirations for great-power regional status, whose desire to overextend and outmatch itself with meager resources, so outstrips reality as that of Pakistan. If it did not have such dire consequences for 170 million Pakistanis and nearly 2 billion people living in South Asia, this magical thinking would be amusing. This is a country that sadly appears on every failing-state list and still wants to increase its arsenal from around 60 atomic weapons to well over 100 by buying two new nuclear reactors from China. This is a country isolated and friendless in its own region, facing unprecedented homegrown terrorism from extremists its army once trained, yet it pursues a “forward policy” in Afghanistan to ensure a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul as soon as the Americans leave.

For a state whose economy is on the skids and dependent on the IMF for massive bailouts, whose elite refuse to pay taxes, whose army drains an estimated 20 percent of the country’s annual budget, Pakistan continues to insist that peace with India is impossible for decades to come. For a country that was founded as a modern democracy for Muslims and non-Muslims alike and claims to be the bastion of moderate Islam, it has the worst discriminatory laws against minorities in the Muslim world and is being ripped apart through sectarian and extremist violence by radical groups who want to establish a new Islamic emirate in South Asia. Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment, or “deep state” as it is called, has lost over 2,300 soldiers battling these terrorists—the majority in the last 15 months after much U.S. cajoling to go after at least the Pakistani (if not the Afghan) Taliban. Despite these losses and considerable low morale in the armed forces, it still follows a pick-and-choose policy toward extremists, refusing to fight those who will confront India on its behalf as well as those Taliban who kill Western and Afghan soldiers in the war next-door. An army that has received nearly $12 billion in direct military aid from the United States since 2001, and has favored-nation status from NATO, still keeps the leaders of the Afghan Taliban in safe refuge. Pakistan’s civilians, politicians and intellectuals are helpless; they cannot make the deep state see sense as long as the West continues its duplicitous policies of propping up the military-intelligence establishment in opposition to popular society while demanding that the Pakistani civilian government wrest back control of the country.

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In another significant piece datelined Kabul, Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti reveal that the man in the eye of the storm of an Afghan-American corruption scandal, Mohammed Zia Salehi—the chief of administration for Afghanistan’s National Security Council—is on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency:

[Mr. Salehi] appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both. Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it…

These ties underscore doubts about how seriously the Obama administration intends to fight corruption here. The anticorruption drive, though strongly backed by the United States, is still vigorously debated inside the administration. Some argue it should be a centerpiece of American strategy, and others say that attacking corrupt officials who are crucial to the war effort could destabilize the Karzai government.

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As Wonkette reported earlier today, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has formed her very own Leadership Political Action Committee, the slush fund of choice for the modern politician.

Like many members of congress, she incorporated her own name into the name of the PAC. Unfortunately, her first name is spelled incorrectly in the Statement of Organization filed with the Federal Election Commission. The PAC is registered with the FEC as MichellePAC.

Nelson Hernandez (among others) took issue with my “clever analysis of President Obama’s excellent chances of re-election.” Hernandez made a number of good points, though he made several comments (for example, Obama has “an insatiable desire to promote socialism”) that make it hard to take him seriously. But here’s an edited version of his email, to which I’ll reply below:

The economy is obviously in dire straits and may well be heading into a full-scale, big-D Depression which will hit us full force before the 2012 election. Even the most mainstream economic commentators are now pretty much throwing in the towel after the crushing GDP and housing numbers we’ve been hearing lately. In short: do a little extrapolation on this disastrous economy and tell me that the Democrats can win re-election in 2012. It’s not a question of where we are today, but where we will be in two years. It doesn’t look good.

Silverstein’s breezy dismissal of all the likely GOP candidates totally fails to take into account the already well-advanced revulsion toward the incumbent that animates broad swathes of the middle class and independent voters. It is also very unlikely that youth and non-black minority groups will mobilize for Obama in the same way they did in 2008. Americans are in distress and are not going to fall for Obama’s soaring yet lightweight rhetoric a second time.

Silverstein’s recollection of history is faulty. Mondale was not the most boring candidate ever; Dukakis was. Mondale was actually one of the better candidates (in terms of competence) the Democrats have put up in the last 40 years.

Finally, Mr. Silverstein completely disregards four personages in the GOP, of which at least one and possibly two will likely be on the 2012 ticket: Gov. Christie (NJ), Gov. Daniels (IN), Rep. Ryan (WI) and Gov. Jindal (LA). All four of them could and would demolish Obama in a debate on any topic in different ways: basic principles, factual analysis, policy analysis. There is absolutely no hope of Obama besting them in an impromptu discussion.

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A few short months ago the media was filled with narratives about 2010 being the “Year of the Insurgent,” a storyline that was always overblown. That’s not because the public is happy with congress, but because a well-funded incumbent is awfully hard to knock off. Even in 2006, when Democrats made huge gains in the House, 94 percent of incumbents won reelection. That’s not to say incumbents aren’t going to lose a few races (and it looks like the Democrats will drop quite a few seats this fall), just that it generally takes extraordinary circumstances, given the corrupted rules of American politics, for challengers to win a significant number of races in any given year.

Furthermore, America is a big place. Winning or losing state and local races depends on different issues in different places; there may not be a One-Size-Fits-All explanation for results around the country. [MORE . . .]

From Stephen Bright, in the Fulton County Daily Report:

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ third ruling that a white supervisor calling black men “boy”—as in “Boy, you better get going” and “Hey, boy”—is not evidence of racial animus was issued last week by Judges Edward E. Carnes and William H. Pryor Jr. in an unsigned, unpublished opinion. Carnes and Pryor are white men and alumni of the Alabama attorney general’s office.

The third judge on the panel, a visiting senior district judge from Ohio appointed by President Ronald Reagan, dissented. He would have upheld a jury verdict finding that Tyson Foods discriminated against a black man, John Hithon, in not promoting him to position as a shift manager at Tyson’s chicken processing plant in Gadsden, Ala., and awarding damages of more than $1 million to Hithon.

With the kind permission of C.H. Beck Verlag, former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and Columbia University historian Fritz Stern, we present here the third in a series of excerpts from the bestselling book Unser Jahrhundert—Ein Gespräch, in an original English translation.

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David Broder of the Washington Post has long had his head so far up Washington’s ass that he is incapable of understanding that there are opinions in America beyond the ten Beltway insiders he gets his talking points from. (An affliction from which much of the D.C. press corps suffers, though generally not in as advanced a state as Broder’s.) In his latest column, he attacks writer John Judis for having opinions that Broder deems out of the mainstream — meaning anything to the left of, say, Senator Blanche Lincoln. Specifically, he endorses Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs’s recent criticism of “the professional left,” or those who are “prematurely finding fault with President Obama” for his failure to pursue reforms favored by liberal groups.

The column itself is a typical Broder snoozer, but what made it interesting was the addendum he tacked on lamenting the passage of Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, and Dan Rostenkowski, the former congressman from Chicago. Both, he said, “cultivated reputations for being tough, combative so-and-sos, but…were boon companions for a lot of us. “ [MORE . . .]