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March 2008
Will they pay taxes, too?
Non-Americans should be allowed to vote in the U.S. presidential election. Or so says Damian Lanigan, a blogger for London’s Telegraph newspaper
He said that the people of Afghanistan, Israel, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and any number of other places have much more at stake in the upcoming election than do U.S. residents.
Lanigan said there are a number of reasons for this. “Firstly, whereas the president has severely limited ability to make progress in domestic policy, he is relatively untrammeled when it comes to affairs abroad. George W. Bush couldn’t get close to reforming Social Security, for instance, despite a Republican congress. No president has much influence over the course of the economy. In contrast, as commander-in-chief of the military the president has enormous power overseas. Who would have thought it would be easier to invade Iraq than to get Harriet Miers on to the Supreme Court?”
So how should the foreign vote be represented? Lanigan suggested: “What about an Internet-based vote of 10 million people from all the countries of the world with as many electoral votes, as, say Michigan?”
Now how’s that for a controversial idea?
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Not Nice? A Brit in Atlanta begs to differ.
Travel writer Nigel Richardson wrote about his visit to Atlanta in today’s London Telegraph newspaper.
He started the article this way: “The concierge in the Sheraton Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, wasn’t happy about our walking to Auburn Avenue, less than a mile away.
“It’s not a nice area,” he said, recommending a taxi. Under the Atlanta Expressway we hurried, and were duly accosted - by a tiny old lady in sun hat and popsocks, sitting at a bus stop. “Good mornin’,” she said. “Y’all have a great day now.”
“Not a nice area? This eastern neighborhood of Downtown Atlanta, known as the Old Fourth Ward, just happens to have produced two of the great figures of modern American history — Margaret Mitchell and Martin Luther King Jr.”
Richardson said it feels incongruous to put them in the same paragraph: the black civil rights activist who was assassinated by a white racist in 1968, and the white author of a novel in which black Americans are depicted in ways that make us wince today.
He goes on to describe his visit to Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue area. He lists as “must-sees” the Martin Luther King National Historic Site and the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum.
All in all, sounds like he had a great trip.
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See Kermit, it is easy being green after all ….
To most parents, Disney films are family friendly tales that both adults and children can enjoy together.
But an academic at Cambridge University in England claims in today’s London Times that Disney films are a lot more than that. He says they have inspired the environmental movement so powerful today while also encouraging people to think green.
David Whitley, a lecturer in English at Cambridge’s faculty of education, says that Bambi, Baloo, the bear from “The Jungle Book,” and the clownfish in “Finding Nemo” are the “unsung heroes of the green lobby.”
He says that Disney’s films have helped generations of children develop “a critical awareness of contested environmental issues” ever since “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was released in 1937.
Conservation is so central to “Bambi,” for example, that it is credited with inspiring many 1960s environmental activists at an early age.
Pro-hunting groups were so fearful of the “Bambi factor” that they protested about the film even before it had been released, he said.
But Tony Juniper of the environmental group Friends of the Earth said: “Undoubtedly there has been a contribution (by Disney). But then again this is a corporation that is building into our culture all sorts of consumer ideas - plastic products and all of that, so the picture is really very mixed.”
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Yao Ming’s fans split on how to heal his fractured foot
Yao Ming, the center for the Houston Rockets, is a global symbol of East-meets-West: China’s first NBA superstar.
But after he fractured his left foot last month, fans in the United States and China are split over how he should treat the injury, the China Daily newspaper reported.
Media reports that traditional Chinese medicine - techniques developed over several millennia by Chinese doctors - would form part of Yao’s recovery process “sparked an outcry from his American fans,” the paper reported last Friday.
One American fan posted an online comment that “no clinical experiments have so far provided a scientific basis for TCM,” and the procedures would be “more appropriately described as witchery.”
Some Chinese doctors, however, would beg to differ. The government-run newspaper quoted several prominent TCM doctors arguing that Chinese practices might be more effective than Western treatments.
“In many respects, TCM treatment of bone fractures, especially wrist fractures and related problems involving soft tissue, has achieved results Western medicine has been unable to accomplish,” said Yi Ping, a doctor of orthopedics at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing.
The jury is still out on what - if any - role TCM should play in Yao’s recovery. Doctors for the Houston Rockets have said a March 4 operation was successful but they would need to evaluate his recovery.
Some Chinese sports doctors agreed that Yao should stick with care offered in the United States.
“We tend to use Western medicine when athletes break their bones,” Yan Hui, a doctor with China’s national speed skating team, told the China Daily.
“TCM is a very good method for rehabilitation, but Western medicine is more efficient in surgeries for athletes.”
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Obviously the Brits haven’t seen America’s version of The Office.
This week London’s Guardian newspaper posed the following question: “Is the U.S. sitcom, like, so over?”
“I can’t imagine a sitcom from America now that could be as huge as Friends was in its mid-1990s heyday,” said writer Gareth McLean.
He said that: “As popular as My Name Is Earl is, I can’t imagine anyone popping into the hairdressers and asking for ‘a Joy’, can you? And though The Big Bang Theory has a bouncy theme tune by The Barenaked Ladies, I can’t see it reaching Number 3 in the singles charts, as The Rembrandts’ ‘I’ll Be There For You’ did back when we were all obsessed with Ross and Rachel and the gang.”
McLean said that — since the end of Will & Grace — there hasn’t been an American sitcom that has truly captured the British public’s imagination.
McLean’s commentary brought about a flood of comments from readers citing their love of U.S. sitcoms such as Scrubs, 30 Rock, and How I Met Your Mother.
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Is CNN’s political team the best on television?
Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper enjoyed an “exclusive” behind-the-scenes look at the new high-tech election studio built by the Atlanta-based network.
Reporter Marc Pitzke said that, every few minutes, CNN hyped its election staff as “the best political team on television” — which recently prompted rival anchor Katie Couric from CBS News [ed: corrected] to promote her crew as “the best political team in the galaxy.” However, according to Pitzke, “CNN’s analysts aren’t much different from their competitors at Fox News and MSNBC.”
He said: “They’re a carefully balanced selection of talking heads, who have found a new, profitable career in this endless election campaign. There’s a liberal, there’s a conservative, there’s an African-American, there’s a Latina. Like sports commentators, they dress up with words what can be plainly seen on the screen anyway.”
According to Pitzke, CNN likes to guard its Election Center like a company secret, but it granted Der Spiegel exclusive behind-the-scenes access for a night following the recent Mississippi primary. The center is a hub where raw data and numbers are stirred into a cocktail of information for millions of viewers worldwide.
“Just before the show starts, the mood is jovial, almost like in a bar. The analysts are joking around; they’re seated at two high plexiglass benches behind each other, like roosting chicken,” Pitzke said. “Soledad O’Brien giggles as she’s being wired and powdered. Hidden behind a wall someone has placed thermos jugs and a half-empty can of soda.”
The “Magic Wall,” also called “Big Board,” is CNN’s most recent attempt to bring classic journalism into the high-tech era — and to lure the Google generation to its programs. John King, who learned his trade as an old-school reporter at the Associated Press, was skeptical at first. “But as I became more familiar with it, I realized that the things it’s capable of are simply remarkable,” he told “Der Spiegel.”
All in all, Pitzke was impressed with a wall that can do almost anything with plain voting results. “It visualizes them as virtual maps, bundles them, explains them, throws them into the future, adds information from Web sites like Google and even displays satellite photos. It can count delegates and superdelegates, add popular votes and project winners and losers,” he gushed.
China hopes US meteorologists will help keep Games dry
China will invite meteorologists from the United States and other countries to help it forecast the weather in Beijing during the Summer Olympics, China’s top weatherman said on Tuesday.
Zheng Guoguang, director of the China Meteorological Administration, said he hoped American scientists could help “enhance our ability to forecast (severe weather) accurately,” the state-run China Daily newspaper reported.
Chinese officials are particularly concerned about rain during the Games, which begin on Aug. 8, and will try to keep the city dry by firing chemicals into clouds outside Beijing to induce precipitation before the clouds reach the city.
China’s main Olympic stadium - dubbed the Bird’s Nest for its intricate structure of interlocking beams - does not have a roof and “the local meteorological bureau has been entrusted the job of preventing rain from spoiling the show there,” the China Daily reported.
But asked if China’s meteorologists would succeed in stopping the rain, Zheng conceded that cloud seeding has “little impact on heavy thunderstorms and squalls.”
Maybe American scientists will be able to help.
Talk about a bad week.
Hillary Clinton may be riding high in the U.S. following her showing in Texas and Ohio, but she’s taking a beating in the British press this week.
First was a report in London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper that quoted former Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, as saying that Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and that she was a “wee bit silly” for exaggerating the part she played.
“I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland,” she told CNN. But Trimble and other negotiators who helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told the Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the grueling political talks over the years.
“I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill Clinton going around,” Trimble said. “I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.”
What might be worse is a column by Andrew Sullivan in the London Times newspaper with the headline: “The Clintons, a horror film that never ends.”
“The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy,” Sullivan wrote. “You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the YouTube campaign, they are like the new 28 Days Later zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway.”
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Yao Ming’s left foot raises chorus of Chinese protest
A foot has never been so noisy.
Ever since Houston Rockets center Yao Ming — China’s first superstar NBA player — was diagnosed with a season-ending stress fracture in his left foot last month, Chinese fans have struggled to make sense of the injury.
China’s leading sports newspaper, Titan Sports, editorialized that “exhaustion was really the major reason for Yao’s injury” and coaches should have allowed him to rest more during games, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Other Chinese have worried that Rockets have underestimated the importance of Yao’s participating in this summer’s Olympics, the first time China has hosted the Games.
“It’s probably hard for some Americans to understand how important the motherland means to Chinese,” a sports commentator wrote in the Global Times, a state-run newspaper. “For Yao Ming, the calling from his nation is more important than his job in the NBA.”
On Tuesday, the Rockets said that an operation on Yao’s foot was successful. But officials have admitted the injury could leave him benched during the Summer Games — a possibility that seemed to stun some Chinese.
“Yao Ming’s injury is because he’s been used too much by the Rockets and the Chinese national team,” a Chinese blogger wrote on one popular Web site. “But since it has happened, all we can do is pray.”
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More from Britain on the Clinton-Obama race …
Like a metronome, European affection seems to swing steadily back and forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Following Tuesday’s primaries, many Europeans seem to have swung back in favor of Clinton. Anatole Kaletsky, a columnist for London’s “Times” newspaper, said that Clinton now seems most likely to become the next president of the United States. He said that Clinton has two qualities to set against Obama’s charisma.
“Her first and most obvious quality is that she is a woman. While official opinion, especially in the U.S. media, self-righteously insists that America is an egalitarian, multicultural society where gender and race should play no role in political allegiance or personal advancement, the fact is that this is nonsense,” he wrote. “Everyone knows that women and blacks continue to lag far behind white male Americans by virtually every social and economic criterion.” He said that if American women unite around Clinton she’ll be unbeatable in November.
Kaletsky said that Clinton’s second big advantage over Obama is John McCain.
“An Obama-McCain contest would be seen as a match of inexperience against old age,” he wrote. “Obama may have a better record on Iraq than Clinton, but on almost every other issue of importance to the American public she is clearly ahead.”
Moreover, she is a Clinton — and can hope to reassure voters with her record of successful centrist economic policies when she was First Lady in the White House. “Obama, by contrast, is on record as being the most consistently liberal member of the Senate, with arguably the most left-wing economic and foreign policy platform since George McGovern was beaten by Richard Nixon, despite the revulsion against the Vietnam War,” he wrote.
In the end, Kaletsky warned that the world should probably prepare for a President McCain or Clinton. President Obama may have to wait until 2012 or 2016.
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U.S. image is dis-credited
The spreading U.S. credit crisis is turning up the heat on Europe’s simmering anti-Americanism, according to an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper.
“As credit woes endanger the world economy, they’re giving Europeans another reason to resent U.S. influence,” the article said.
Anti-Americanism already was simmering because of the Iraq war, dislike for President Bush, and mistrust of rampaging buyout firms, it said. Now, Europe’s pundits and politicians are feeding public perceptions that ordinary folks will be left paying the bill for the financial missteps of big banks.
“This crisis shows why the market must be regulated. Left to itself, it often produces the worst,” says Jean Quatremer, the Brussels correspondent for France’s Libération newspaper.
The article said that this latest outburst of anti-Americanism could have repercussions for American businesses abroad.
Indeed, as popular European attitudes against the American brand of capitalism harden, governments may tilt left (it’s already happening in Germany) and economic nationalism will get a boost, as it has in France. “The resulting backlash could make it harder for U.S. firms to make acquisitions in Europe, and high-risk, high-reward financial products from Wall Street will be ferociously scrutinized,” the article said.
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