If you’ve been following the election, then you know that John Kerry has pledged not only to preserve present middle-class tax cuts, but to augment them with targeted cuts, like tax breaks for people trying to send their kids to college. For wealthy people–himself included–on the other hand, he has promised to roll back the tax cuts for the rich, to pay for incidentals like Education and Health Care.

George Bush, on the other hand, has made no secret of his intent to protect, prolong and increase his tax cuts for the rich–and has done so by throwing meaningless bones to the middle class, and by fooling people of modest means that his tax cuts are somehow aimed at them. And many are happy with their tax cuts, despite having them wholly cancelled out by under-the-radar costs such as high energy prices, large cuts in government services, lower salaries and wages, and local and state tax hikes to pay for lower federal assistance.

Bush continued that streak by making two incredibly outrageous statements yesterday. First was his statement that Kerry’s tax rollbacks for the rich would hit small business owners because, and I quote, “the rich in America happen to be the small business owners.” Come again? Small business owners comprise the “rich” population in the U.S.? Give me a break. And Bush’s awareness of that lie can be easily tested by asking him to limit his tax cuts to people earning over $200,000 to only the owners of small businesses. See how fast he dumps that possibility.

But then Bush went further. He said that raising taxes on wealthy people has failed in the past because, and again I quote, “the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway.” So his official position is to give tax cuts to the rich because they’ll find a way to get the money illegally anyway?

I am reminded of an old political cartoon I saw in a book many years ago. The cartoon was published about a century ago, and featured two overweight men, dressed in coats and top hats–the obligatory rich-guy getup in comics–both laughing hysterically at a piece of paper one of them is holding, on which is printed three words: “tax the rich.” It apparently was as true back then as it is today, and this spirit lives on in the Bush administration.

The truth is, under the Bush administration, the IRS has been morphed into a “give the rich anything they want” agency. This policy of letting wealthy people get off without paying has even gone beyond helping them establish foreign-based offices so they can escape paying taxes in the U.S., they also help out people who can not or do not take that particular out.

22-year senior IRS auditor Remy Welling is now risking a jail sentence to make the people aware of this tacit assistance to the rich. She has blown the whistle on this practice, citing the specific case of Silicon Valley corporation Micrel, which the IRS secretly helped to avoid paying $51 million in taxes it was legally bound to pay–and then additionally helped the top executives get an additional $20 million by keeping information secret from its shareholders. Welling found this out when she was given the case and told that the IRS settled the deal before an audit of the company even began. And these guys are not “small business owners.”

Under the Bush administration, face-to-face tax audits on corporations have been slashed in half. $311 billion in owed tax revenue went uncollected last year, nearly two-thirds of the current budget deficit.

This is not just giving tax breaks to the rich, this is the Bush IRS practically handing cash to rich people at the expense of middle-class taxpayers. That’s how much he “supports” the working American.

Remember a report recently where Kerry and Edwards traded shots with hecklers? It doesn’t matter which one, it’s happened so often (here’s just one example–Google to find dozens more). Have you noticed that this happens to Kerry, even his wife, very frequently, and that this rarely happens to Bush? That’s not a coincidence.

When John or Teresa Kerry and John Edwards speak to audiences, they’re speaking to real crowds, mostly Democrats as that’s the crowd they draw, but also to moderates and Republicans, for whom it is simple to get in. They pay the price for that–they get heckled constantly, Republicans coordinate to disrupt their events, we start hearing about groups chanting “Four More Years!” for Bush, and so on. It’s a hassle, but at least Kerry and Edwards are honest in whom they talk to–it’s no PR stunt meant for the local TV station, it’s the real deal, so to speak. And the advantage is not only to be seen as authentic; they also get to speak to more swing voters in person this way.

Bush, on the other hand, seems terrified of speaking in front of a crowd that isn’t 100% full of gung-ho supporters–even in the military, which is strongly Republican. Remember his secret flight to Baghdad so he could serve up plastic turkey? The GI’s who got to enjoy the Thanksgiving dinner were there only because they had answered a written questionnaire in which they supported the president a hundred percent–and those who answered less heartily were sent to their barracks to eat MREs. True story.

And it’s no less true on the campaign trail. Bush has been doing videotaped “town-hall” meetings, and wouldn’t you know, the crowds are all enthusiastically supportive of the president, the questions are softballs and there is not a dissenting or truly challenging voice to be heard. Some people don’t even ask questions; they simply stand up, spout out effusive praise of Bush, and then sit down to thunderous applause. Bush spokespeople claim that these are not staged, that they never know what people will say. Riiiiigghht.

Cheney is making his rounds of the speech-and-town-hall circuit as well, and with him as well, they’re not letting in anyone but the party faithful–it’s invitation only, to which members of the public are wondering, “Since when does a town hall meeting feature ‘invitation only’ participants?”

But Bush and Cheney’s standards for who gets in can be severely draconian. Nowadays, to get into one of their appearances, you actually have to sign a loyalty oath, pledging to back the president and vote for him in November before you can be given tickets. Bush people claim that they foiled organized attempts to disrupt their rallies, which is baloney–if all you have to do is sign a loyalty oath, determined protesters aren’t going to stop at signing them. But the GOP goes farther than that, requiring identification as a registered Republican or other credentials which will guarantee that you will do nothing but cheer heartily once you’re inside.

This fake popularity, exercised predominantly by the GOP, has its advantages–when Bush and Cheney appear on television and in news reports, they come across as wildly popular. One can only guess that this is all that Bush’s people care about, and if you have to insult and piss off a whole lot of people to do it, well, the TV audience is bigger than the crowd that didn’t get in.

But as the GOP continues to dismiss Michael Moore for using his craft to create false impressions, this Bush policy makes it very clear that the GOP is far more adept at creating false impressions–or as Moore would say, creating a “fictitious president.”

Were Bush or Cheney to make an appearance before a real crowd of Americans, not stacked, not hand-picked, not just the party faithful, but a group of true-blue, everyday Americans, they would surely falter under the lack of enthusiasm and sometimes outrage that they have generated. The cheers would be more realistically scattered, the silence of much or the crowd thick in the air, the dissatisfaction palpable.

Which, of course, is exactly why they stack the crowds.

I just got my passport back from the Chinese Embassy today, and they did something that frustrates and mystifies me: when they put in the tourist visa, they placed it five pages after the last full page–in other words, they skipped over four blank pages in my passport that now will be avoided and unused in the future, as immigration officials usually place stamps after the last used page. Essentially, the Chinese embassy just wasted one quarter of the empty pages in my passport. And this is not the first time–several years ago, in my last passport, a Japanese immigration official did the exact same thing, though for a one-year working visa.

On top of that, a simple tourist visa is now an adhesive label which takes up a whole page–twice the size of a 3-year working visa from Japan–further filling up the passport. A simple 9-day trip to China is taking up 5 of 16 free pages in a brand-new passport, meaning I’m probably going to have to get replacement pages before the passport is even halfway to its expiration date.

Has anyone else had the skip-four-pages thing done to them?

Keyes is already suffering from foot-in-mouth disease, and unabashedly so. He said of his opponent Barak Obama:

“I would still be picking cotton if the country’s moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence… [Obama] has broken and rejected those principles he has taken the slaveholder’s position.”

We’re already beginning to see why Keyes has badly lost every race he’s gotten into. It’ll be very interesting to see the polling data for Illinois next week. And because of the very high-profile nature of this race, it may have an effect on many other races as well. If there were ever a race that better showcased the true principles of each party, this would have to be it–and the Democrats could not ask for a better representative than Obama.

You have probably heard the Swift Boat Veterans for “Truth” advertisement, in which they go around saying, I served with John Kerry!” and then denounce him in a variety of ways. The group claims to be non-partisan. Their ad, however, is so full of lies, that if the truth were told, the ad would sound very different–imagine “Swift Boat Veterans Under Truth Serum”:

“I didn’t serve with Kerry, but I was in Vietnam at the same time as he was, and now I’m a partisan Republican who is really pissed at him. So I’m here to smear him any way I can, and use the fact that I was in Vietnam to do so.”

“Me too. I never served a day with him, but I was over there at about the same time. I don’t like the fact that he spoke out against the war, so I’m trying to keep him from being elected now. But if I just say that I don’t like him for his anti-war protests, that wouldn’t be so convincing, so I’m pretending that I knew the guy and that I have the right to criticize him.”

“I didn’t serve with Kerry in action either, and I initially claimed Kerry lied about what happened in Vietnam. But it was my statement that was a lie. I don’t know how anyone would have taken the risks he took in combat just for the glory of running for office. It was a terrible mistake probably for me to sign the affidavit with those words. I’m the one in trouble here. . . . I knew it was wrong. I really don’t know anything first-hand.”

“I didn’t serve with Kerry, but I met him at an officer’s club once. As I recall, he complained that we didn’t get enough air support, and that’s about it. But I’m willing to make him sound like a coward and a traitor because of my political leanings.”

“I kind of served with John Kerry in Vietnam, in that I worked for someone on a different swift boat, and I heard somewhere that Kerry needed a lot of supervision. I’m willing to make that sound as bad as I can.”

“I served on a different boat than Kerry, and I saw from just a few yards away when he was supposedly wounded, and he was lying–he wasn’t wounded and there was no enemy fire, and he ran away. Well, actually, he wasn’t a few yards away, he was a few hundred yards away. And actually, I’m claiming he ran away and there was no enemy fire, which doesn’t make any sense. And the guy whose life he saved and was right there with Kerry completely contradicts me. Hmm. Maybe I’m lying.”

“I treated Kerry for one of his wounds in Vietnam, and I’m here to testify that he clumsily shot himself and then demanded a purple heart. Of course, I’m kind of lying, because I never treated Kerry, and I actually have no idea what really happened, I just claim that I heard something from these two guys, though they both completely deny telling me anything.”

The above, of course, is a mixture of actual quotes, and fictional quotes based upon actual observations (see factcheck.org). And here’s a real veteran:

“My name is John McCain. I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable. As it is none of these individuals served on the boat Kerry commanded. Many of his crewmates have testified to his courage under fire. I think John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam.”

Furthermore, the group is hardly “partisan.” The initial funding came from a Texas Republican who has given millions of dollars to the GOP; other funds come from another Texas Republican, and leading all of this is John O’Neill, who was hand-picked by the Nixon administration to try to smear and renounce Kerry, and has been gunning for him ever since.

This is the biggest salvo yet in the now months-long campaign to try to smear Kerry, a campaign which started with fake claims of Botox injections, ginned-up photos of Kerry and Jane Fonda, completely fabricated claims that Kerry had an affair with an intern reporter, and a phony claim that Kerry tried to dodge the draft. Now there are shadows of the Nixon dirty-tricks teams; just like the Nixon con men who rode up and down in elevators all day talking loudly about completely fake smear stories about Democrats so people would overhear them and repeat the stories, their modern counterparts are using the Internet, spreading emails that Teresa Heinz Kerry gave money to terrorists and paid for Saddam Hussein’s attorney–and God alone knows what other venomous crap is out there.

This is more than just anti-Kerry advertising, we’re now in the middle of what we all fully expected: an all-out, pedal-to-the-metal dirty-tricks smear campaign against Kerry, orchestrated by the GOP for Bush’s benefit. So far, there hasn’t been much public reaction against Kerry, who has been doing extremely well in battleground state polling, and if we’re lucky, the smear campaign will backfire. But we have to remember, the GOP is extremely good at doing this kind of thing. So we watch (while suspending belief in the commercials and anything coming from the right wing about Kerry), and wait.

The site, that is. I just fixed a stylesheet problem that should make the blog and the right-hand sidebar display correctly. But each browser (especially Explorer) has its quirks, and a web page will display differently on different computers, on different browsers (with different versions), and with the monitor set at different resolutions.

Unfortunately, most people (60% of the visitors here) still use Explorer, despite its flaws and lack of features, even despite the security flaws that constantly pop up to the extent that experts have warned everyone not to use it at all (PC World comments, “It’s hard to imagine that anyone would continue to use Internet Explorer faced as it is with such massive security issues”). But Microsoft owns the desktop, and they put Explorer there, so people use it for no better reason that it’s the only one there. (Honestly, Mozilla / Firefox are far superior and easy as pie to download and install, from Mozilla.org.)

So most people use Explorer, but many use Mozilla/Firefox, a good number use Safari, and the rest use Netscape, opera and a few other odd third-party browsers. Some people have large monitors set to higher resolutions, some still use a 600 x 800 setting; some people use Windows PCs, and the rest of us use Macs. Which means that your web page has to be designed specifically to fit each and every one of those combinations.

This site will always be best-optimized for Mozilla/Firefox, but I try to make it fit as many conditions as possible.

So let me know: does the site display poorly for you? You should be able to see the sidebar at right, with the Linkboard, the “Best of” list, calendar and other links; all the text should be visible, not obscured or shifted askew, not unduly large or tiny.

If something is displaying wrong or poorly, please add a comment and let me know, and kindly include your platform (Mac or PC), OS version, the browser you’re using, the browser version, and if you know it, your screen resolution (e.g. 1280 x 854).

Your help is much appreciated!

As reported earlier, the Illinois GOP has badly mishandled the Senate race there. They faced a popular, well-respected contender in Barak Obama. When candidate Jack “Family Values” Ryan left the race due to a sex scandal, they tried to engage a string of celebrities, millionaires and party faithful to take on the campaign, but they all failed; then they turned to the race card, paring the list of hopefuls down to two African-Americans, hoping that would counter the fact that Obama is black. They claimed it was mere coincidence that their finalists were both black, but in a party which is overwhelmingly white, it’s like saying that you just “happened” to deal yourself two straight-flushes in a row and that no, the deck is not stacked, why do you ask? The GOP clearly hopes that by making their conservative candidate black, that African-Americans in Illinois will somehow feel that Keyes is just as appealing as Obama.

Alan Keyes, however, carries the burden of instant hypocrisy: in 2000, he forcefully criticized Hillary Clinton for carpetbagging, or running for a seat in a state she had no relation to, saying that it represented the destruction of his beloved federalism, that she would “go into a state she doesn’t even live in and pretend to represent people there, so I certainly wouldn’t imitate it.” And of course, that is exactly what he is doing now. Is he destroying federalism? Of course not! You see, he felt that he should leave Maryland and go to Illinois in order to “defend the land of my spirit and my conscience and my heart. If indeed that land is the state of Illinois, then I have lived in the Land of Lincoln all my life.”

Ooooohhh, I see! He’s been a spiritual resident of Illinois since birth! What an amazing revelation! I should do that! After all, I can’t vote for California state Senators or Representatives because I live overseas and don’t pay state taxes–so I instead will claim residence in Texas, which has no state taxes. Actual physical residency? Posh! It’s been my spiritual home since birth! Yes, that’s the ticket!

What an outrageous hypocrite.

In addition to the hypocrisy, Keyes also brings with him a record of being the perennial loser. Even in his home state, he lost two Senate races by landslides (in 1988, getting only 38.2% of the votes, and in 1992, getting 29%–they love him there!), and was a Republican presidential contender in 1996 and 2000, again finishing way, way last. So now he’s gearing up for embarrassing loss #5, right on time for his every-four-years failure. And this time, he’s promising not to pay himself a “salary” from campaign contributions (read: stuffing donations into his own pocket) like he did in 1992.

This should be fun.

Well, vacation is now fully underway for me, and so I took this opportunity to tweak the site a little bit. There are a few small cosmetic changes, like moving the calendar down below some other items on the right-hand sidebar on the main page (I don’t think many people ever use that), and the elimination of the calendar on individual entry pages (where the calendar never functioned anyway). The main addition, however, is The Best of BfAD.

This blog has gotten so big–766 posts as of this one–that surfing the main categories sometimes leads to a hundred or more posts coming down. It becomes harder and harder to find just the topic you might be interested in. And as much as I might like to think that every word I write is riveting, I am fully aware that a person going through these posts might find less of it as armchair-gripping as I might. Searching for exactly what you want is just fine, but you have to know what to search for. So I went through all 765 existing posts and found the ones that I thought were most noteworthy–133 of them in all, or nearly one in every six. The top 25 are now listed just below the linkboard on the right-hand sidebar. At the bottom of that list is a link to the “Best Of” special page, which lists all 133, categorized and summarized in a single line each.

After looking through all the political posts, I think I could probably paste them together into a book or something; it’s hard to believe I’ve done that much essay-writing on the topic. But they do hold the basic principles of my political ideology, and a lot of important facts and views that I think people should read, particularly before this coming election.

Other categories on the “Best Of” page include Japan Information & Resources, Audio/Video Posts, and Other Popular Posts.

Enjoy!

One of the Bush apologists coming to comment on this site, remarking on the dismal May-July job numbers, tried to fob off the slump to the idea that July is a “volatile” month; specifically, he wrote: “HINT: July is typically a very volitile month for employment numbers.”

This is what comes from believing everything you hear from the Bush administration and right-wing econopundits. The idea that we are gaining more and more jobs, and it’s just that July is traditionally volatile, so we’ll jump back up in August–it’s a pipe dream, no more and no less. First, volatility goes both ways: it might get you numbers lower than are real, but it also might get you numbers higher than are real. Second, whether or not a month is often volatile is no guarantee that the numbers for this July were actually volatile. In other words, it’s all just blowing smoke.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

I went to the web site of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found a page with all the job data since 1994. I then copied that into Excel, translated the table to columnar form, and then started banging out charts. Here’s the first, and most relevant to the topic at hand–job growth figures for 2004:

What’s the first thing you see? It’s glaringly obvious: a spike in March, which then declines in a nice, steady curve up through July. That ain’t no blip you see in July, and it’s not volatility–it is a smooth, regular trend. In fact, if you see this as a straight-line trend rather than a curving one, then July’s numbers should have been lower, suggesting that volatility made the July numbers appear higher than they should have been. It is possible that with next month’s report, we may see July’s numbers revised downward.

So much for the Bush jobs surge, and so much for Bush-favoring “volatility.”

I figured that I had done all this work to get the chart made, let’s look at a few others. Here’s one that shows job growth during the entire Bush presidency:

Here’s where we see the overall job loss during the Bush Jr. years. Note how the numbers seem to have been trying to go up in mid-2002? See how they sputtered and began falling again? That’s where the job recovery should have been. And that’s where it would have been, had Bush not done everything wrong. And if you add all those positive and (mostly) negative numbers together, you’ll see where those 1.1 million jobs disappeared to.

But to get a real feel for how Bush anemia has stacked up against the Clinton job juggernaut, look at this chart:

Blue is total number of jobs under Clinton, red is total number of jobs under Bush. There’s really no contest at all, is there?

You want jobs? Good jobs? Well-paying jobs? Or heck, even any job at all?

Vote for Kerry.

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful – and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we.”

—George W. Bush, during a signing ceremony for a defense bill, Aug. 5, 2004

Update: Thanks to Mark at VuDeja for pointing me to this audio file of Bush’s statement (now hosted here).

After a few months of tepid job growth, the Bush administration tried to paint the economy as “recovering”–in fact, they tried to say that it was great, never better. In June, the number of new jobs dropped to 112,000, way below what anyone would consider “strong,” and in fact, was below the 150,000 new jobs required simply to keep up with population growth. Republicans countered that this was only a blip, that June was artificially low, and that July numbers would prove the recovery was truly back. Nevertheless, they only projected 220,000 jobs for July, as high as possible to make things seem rosy, as few as possible so as not to look bad if numbers were not really too high. But some hopeful estimates were for as many as 300,000 new jobs.

Well, the July numbers are now out. How many new jobs?

32,000.

Not only that, but revised estimates for May and June revealed that those months actually added 61,000 fewer jobs than was previously estimated. Therefore, relative to job numbers assumed true last month, there was negative job growth of 29,000. It turns out that May increased by 208,000 jobs (as opposed to 242,000), and June by only 78,000 (as opposed to 112,000).

This means that total job growth over the past three months has been, on average, only 106,000 per month, a great deal lower than what is necessary to cancel out population growth–and it is most definitely on a downward trend.

It will be extraordinarily hard to support any statement that claims we are in a “recovery.”

This is what the Bush administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy has wrought. And please don’t try to tell me about any tax cuts for the middle class, there haven’t been any; after skyrocketing fuel costs, lower and lower wages and salaries, rising local taxes and the cutting of services, in addition to all the other costs due to Bush policies, whatever money you got back from the government has long since been sucked right back out of your pocket–and as a result, the economy remains stagnant. This is not the way to go.

What we need is to have a president who will not throw hundreds of billions of dollars (as well as a thousand soldier’s lives) into an unnecessary war, who will allow corporate greed and job exportation to go unchecked, who will continue to take money from the poor and funnel it to the rich. We need someone who will provide for good health care instead of sacrificing it so that drug companies can make even more obscene profits. We need someone who will not throw boatloads of cash at energy companies who are already flush at the expense paid by the average Joe, but instead have energy policy written for the people, not the energy corps. We need a president who will give tax breaks to people who need them, and who will roll back welfare-for-the-wealthy and use those billions and trillions to pay for good education (the best-payment investment for the future!) and good health care. We need a president who will give companies tax breaks for keeping good jobs here, instead of giving tax breaks to corporations that send them overseas. And we need a president who does not encourage or even allow corporations to make a huge profit and then pay no taxes by having a P.O. Box in the Cayman Islands.

Four more years of Bush will not only prolong this recession, it will also depress whatever natural recovery comes along, a recovery that even just without any action would have been here in truth already.

The only way to really recover is to get Kerry into office, evident not only by his clear-cut and rational plans (or download their book, “Our Plan for America,” a 1.36 MB PDF file), but also by the historical fact that Democratic presidents always deliver the jobs.

Quick Update: Hugh over at DAJ commented that if you want a new job nowadays, try out for prison guard: 2 million Americans are now in jail, and despite losing so many manufacturing jobs, Bush created at least 206,000 new prison guard positions–probably more, since that last number was a 2002 stat.

Every summer in Japan you get cicadas, or “semi” (蝉) in Japanese. Not the type that come out once every 17 or 18 years, this bunch comes out every summer, and man, do they make a lot of noise. The Japanese characterize this noise as, “meeeee, meeeee, meeeeeeee.” To which I then comically note how selfish they are. That is what Japanese people refer to as an “Oyaji gyagu,” (親父ギャグ) or an “old man’s gag.”

The cicadas, meanwhile, are everywhere, buzzing and mating. And as the mating cycle dies down, you start seeing a lot cicadas on the ground. But just because you see them belly-up, it doesn’t mean they’re done for–these cicadas, it so happens, have a very tough time righting themselves once they’ve got six legs in the air. I’ve seen them do it, but usually they just lay there, immobile and apparently dead.

So the thing to do–unless you really hate cicadas, that is–is to gently nudge them over with a toe, to get them righted. But be prepared to jump away, though: the cicadas will, unless really close to death, immediately start buzzing up and away in the apparent random fashion that bugs are wont to do.

If you haven’t been to Engrish.com, you should go there–an on-line collection of all sorts of funny English spotted and photographed in Japan. Not that I don’t see a whole bunch myself. I remember back in Toyama in the mid-80’s, I found a hairdressing salon that sported the name “Hair Salon Bow-Wow.” I kid you not. I already posted about a parking lot sign that somehow misspelled a common two-letter word, the only word on the sign, and about a shop that was unclear on the concept of how sales are “on.”

Yesterday, I was going to the travel agency to pay off the last of my plane ticket to China, and in the entrance of the building there was an ad on two panels of a glass wall to the business there. First you see:

And then:

And so:

I still have some other funny-English photos from the past. I’ll try to post some soon.

I forgot that when you apply for a visa, the embassy or consulate in question requires you to leave your passport with them when you apply. So until Tuesday next week, China has mine. Despite missing out on the discount price of ¥41,000 ($367) and having to spend ¥60,000 ($537) on the air ticket, I figure it’s worth it–I have a friend living in Shanghai who’ll still be on vacation when I go, and can show me around–I’m not likely to have that opportunity again soon. So it’ll be maybe 5 or 6 days in Shanghai and 2-3 days in Beijing, should be fun.

The only concern: how will I be able to blog? My friend tells me that you can buy a card to have wireless access in Starbucks (of course, they’re everywhere), so if that works out, I’ll still be able to post every day. If not, I’ll have to figure out something else, like an Internet cafe. I hope for the Starbucks Wi-Fi, though, as it’ll allow me to post photos.

I blogged about this about a year ago, this great Spanish spice called Pimentón, a smoky hot paprika used in Chorizo, but I have become so fond of it, I use it on all sorts of foods. It’s good on beef, chicken, gyoza, eggs–anything you can imagine that could take a hot spice. The problem is getting the right stuff. I first found out about Pimentón when I went to Spain and asked where the taste of Chorizo comes from. I brought back to Japan with me three 175-gram tins of the spice under the La Dalia label, and when I visited the U.S., I found a few other different brands, Chiquilin and La Chinata. But La Dalia beats them easily–much richer flavor.

The problem was, I was not sure how I could get some, especially from Japan. A friend found some pimentón advertised for sale here, but the price was exorbitant. But as my supply dwindles, I started looking on my own–and found a few different ways to get some. I found an import company in Naka-Meguro called Serrano, and they sell it by the 1-kg bag (and I was just in that neighborhood today, before I found out–dang!). They sell the 1 kg bag for ¥4410, which is $10 higher than quoted in other countries, but considering shipping costs, may not be bad at all! The shop will be open through Monday August 9th, then be on vacation through the 15th, and will re-open on the 16th. Alas, I am too tired to trudge back into town again, at least not today, and am going in on the 10th to get my tourist visa and a dental exam, so I might not get to them until after mid-month.

Yahoo’s ChefShop sells it by tins, but I’m not sure how hard or expensive it would be to have them ship it internationally.

And then there’s the company itself, La Dalia, which has an English version of its site. I am asking them if they can ship and if so, how much it will cost. They list international distributors, but the closest is in the Philippines.

I’ll let you know what comes up, what is the best way to get it, and how much it’ll cost.

You know, the GOP usually has its act together. So what’s up with the race for the GOP-held Senate seat in Illinois?

The Democratic contender, Barak Obama, used to be pit against Jack “Family Values” Ryan, the ex of actress Jeri Ryan, whose divorce testimony turned up accusing Jack of trying to get her to perform explicit sex acts in public. After withering for a while, Ryan quit. After Obama made a fantastic keynote speech at the DNC, he skyrocketed.

So the GOP scrambled for a replacement. They tried celebrity Mike Ditka, but (forgive the football imagery) they fumbled it rather badly, and Ditka declined. So they fished around some more, with contenders yanking themselves out of contention almost as fast as the GOP can consider them, and then they stumbled upon the brilliant idea: Obama is black, that must be why he’s winning, so let’s find a black Republican candidate! In standard Republican fashion, they set about trying to find the rather unusual combination of black and GOP-brand conservative, and they came up with two names: former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, and former Bush deputy drug czar Andrea Grubb Barthwell.

Of course, the GOP had to look like color wasn’t a factor; a Republican representative said, “These two were selected because of their strengths, not because of their color. Voters are smarter than that. That clearly wasn’t the intent.” Yeah. Right. Barthwell also said, “I don’t think that this committee is playing any kind of race card here. I think they have looked at the candidates and the strengths they can bring to it and how they position themselves on the issues.” But Barthwell is pretty much an unknown on the issues. And since (a) the GOP is looking at two prominent black candidates to fill the spot, and (b) prominent black Republicans are extremely rare, it’s pretty clear exactly what’s going on.

And there are more problems: Barthwell, it turns out, stands accused of Clarence-Thomas-like sexual harassment, a staffer saying that she made statements which were “lewd, derogatory and called into question his heterosexuality.” Read Marshall’s column for the unsavory details.

Well, that leaves Keyes, right? And despite being radical, not to mention having willfully thrown himself into Michael Moore’s mosh pit in 1996, there is one other problem: he’s from Maryland. Why is that a problem, when he can become eligible for Illinois citizenship well in time for the election? Because in 2000, on Fox News, when it was suggested that he run for Senate in New York, he responded sharply: “I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton’s willingness go into a state she doesn’t even live in and pretend to represent people there, so I certainly wouldn’t imitate it.”

Oops.

So the GOP is going with someone up on sexual harassment charges, or someone who would become an instant hypocrite.

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?

For even more GOP ineptitude, read this DailyKos article about how a GOPster got slapped upside the head by Donna Brazille when he suggested that Kerry wasn’t distinguished as a senator.

Haven’t done this in a while, but there are a few peripheral stories of interest out there today, so…

Conservatives and conservative news organizations were allowed unparalleled access to the Democratic National Convention (will Al Franken get a desk at the RNC? Hope so, but bet not), and unsurprisingly used that access to best sabotage and derail the Democratic message. After each speech, hard-right-wingers like Tucker Carlson, Ralph Reed and others were given the chance to smash & smear the Democrat who had just spoken and Democrats in general. Fox News had a desk there, but used it to do little more than deride the Democrats–they spent very little time showing the convention at all. Mostly it was Bill O’Reilly taking pot-shots at Democrats. For example, when Gore came up to speak, O’Reilly quipped, “We might listen in for a minute or so, but we’re trying to stay away from partisan speech in both conventions this year.” Stay away from partisan speech at conventions? Isn’t that a bit like staying away from sand at the beach? And there’s mlittle doubt that at the Republican convention, they’ll decide that very little is “partisan.”

Fliers from Boston to D.C. were forced to wait two hours while their plane was diverted to Albany, N.Y. Why? To pick up stranded passengers who had been stuck there because their plane had mechanical difficulties. The passengers were told of the diversion just as the plane was getting ready to take off, and they were not happy at all. None of them had ever experienced or even heard of such a thing before (and indeed, airline experts say that this is “extremely rare”). Unhappy, the fliers sat through the prolonged flight, and when they arrived in Albany to pick up the extras, guess who waltzed on the plane with a secret service entourage? That’s right: Jenna and Barbara Bush. The US Airways representative claimed that this happened “often,” but no one is buying it.

Cheney has someone new to blame for higher oil prices: the Democrats. Yep, it’s them pesky Democrats at work again. Apparently, the administration’s war in the Persian Gulf, failure to seriously pursue alternative energy sources (despite the tremendous lip service given) and reckless economic “stimulus” packages (i.e., forking over tax dollars to the wealthy) are not nearly as responsible for higher gas prices as the Democrats, who, according to Cheney, drove prices up at the pump–how? By not voting for every last bill for more drilling and oil company tax breaks that Bush tried to ram down the Congress’ throat. Yeah. That must be the reason.

Al Franken will be on TV starting in September–or at least on cable TV, the Sundance Channel. I think it’s good news, but not nearly enough of it. He’s only getting one hour a week (correction: once a day, rebroadcast three times), and supposedly it is slated only to last until the election, though Franken hopes it will last longer than that. I would hope that they get a longer time slot, on a more watched channel (Bravo or something). Still, one can’t be too grabby–Air America Radio is still in its infancy, and though its initial key demographic ratings are excellent, it is still in the stages of building an audience. And yet, better TV exposure would help the new network attract more listeners.

In the meantime, we’ll be holding our collective breath for this Friday’s employment report, which will tell us how many jobs were gained or lost during the month of July. This will be a rather crucial report: June’s numbers were down significantly (to 112,000), and if July’s are lackluster as well, it would indicate that the “recovery” that Bush grasped at this Spring may have been more of a blip than a recovery. Current estimates report that perhaps 200,000 jobs were created in July; if true, the Bush administration will jump on them, essentially saying, “see? That sounds like a pretty high number!” But it should be kept in mind that 150,000 is considered ‘treading water,’ the number needed to match population growth. Meaning an extra 50,000 jobs, while an improvement over June, would still be pretty anemic. In the meantime, the market has been down, consumer confidence and consumer spending have sagged, and energy prices are soaring. If this is a “recovery,” on can get an idea of what a “normal” Bush economy would be like.

On the lighter side, NBC has offered Clinton the chance to host an episode of Saturday Night Live this season. If he takes it, it should be interesting–and probably damned funny. James Carville had a good story, reported by a member of the Democrats Abroad Japan mailing list: “Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we’d lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I’ll be damned if all those things didn’t come true!”

A few days ago, as you are almost certainly aware, the terror alert was raised to “orange” the the D.C. and NYC areas because the Bush Administration told the public that from a raid in Pakistan it had just uncovered a plot to attack the stock exchange and The Citigroup Center in Manhattan, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings in Washington and Prudential Financial Inc.’s headquarters in Newark, N.J. Police shut down streets, banned trucks from driving anywhere near those buildings, started searching vehicles and asking people for documentation. A police presence can strongly be felt around these areas, and it is clear that very large amounts of money and other resources are being spent on this alert. Bush told the country that “What we’re talking about here is a very serious matter based on solid intelligence.”

Well, now it turns out that although the information was just uncovered this week in Pakistan, the information itself was three to four years old–pre-9/11.

So why did we immediately jump to high alert and put massive resources into protecting these buildings as if the attack were coming tomorrow? There’s no good reason. You act suddenly if you find information that is current–but not just because you currently found information which is old. The dated evidence would indeed explain why the Bush people said that they knew “where” the attacks would be, but “not when.” And Bush & Co. claim that their sudden panic response is justified because they are hearing chatter that an attack will take place sometime before the election–despite the fact that there is absolutely no connection between the aged Pakistan data and the current chatter data.

It’s like you find an old newspaper from a few years ago that carried a warning that a tornado could strike somewhere in the U.S.–and so you panic and immediately hide in the southwest corner of your basement. Everyone else would think you to be a fool, and after a few hours, even you begin to wonder exactly how long you should stay down there. The Bush reaction to this data is similar: the information is years out of date, and in that time any number of factors could have changed. There’s no reason to believe that these plans are the current ones by al Qaeda, or anywhere close to being the only plans–there could be far more targets easily switched to, or any number of other terrorist plans that we know nothing about. And how long will millions of dollars and countless man-hours of resources be spent? After three weeks and no action, will we still but shutting down the traffic around our financial centers and stopping everyone who goes there? And even assuming that the terrorists were, after 3 or 4 years, just now on the verge of carrying out such an attack, what would keep them from simply changing their target?

It comes as no surprise to me that CNN is downplaying this point to the extreme. Watching their coverage, they only obliquely refer to the aged data, and otherwise paint this as a strong, smart and effective response to critical data. This is simply one more reason why I am, in disgust, abandoning CNN as much as I can–even to the point of trying to get satellite TV instead of cable, since on my current cable plan CNN is all there is for news.

Many sectors of the media, especially television, are turning sharply against Kerry now, portraying him in a “losing” light, while showing Bush in a “strong president” light. The news agencies are covering Kerry only in the context of “where’s the bounce?” even as they carry, in the immediate wake of the Democratic convention, nothing but stories on the hyped-up terror threat and how Bush is reacting to it, cheerleading the president all the way.

The fundamental point I’m leading up to on these events is the fact that the Bush administration is rather blatantly using fear as a political weapon, and the media is lapping it up. But how can the administration so easily wag the dog, so flagrantly play on people’s fears, and not have people recognize it?

A lot of it has to do with the fact that people do not want to admit that they are afraid, and even more, do not want to admit that they allow their fears to dictate their actions. I suggested as much to one person I was debating with on the Internet, suggesting that fear was being used as a tool–and that person completely rejected the possibility, as if it were ludicrous to even suggest that it could be done.

But it is a classic political weapon, used down the ages. Make the people afraid, and then tell them you are the one who can save them.

Think about how it has affected you. I mean, really, seriously consider it. If you are on an airplane and you see a group of Arab-looking men, would you be at least nervous? After getting off the plane hours later, would you not be even a little more willing to support racial profiling in screening passengers for security threats? What if you worked at one of the buildings being watched in the current alert? Wouldn’t this whole scare make you think twice about going to work, and would it not make you more eager to support actions to thwart the terrorists? If the answer to those questions, and others like them, is “yes,” then congratulations: you have just had your political views adjusted by fear.

Fear is not only a weapon, it is perhaps the most powerful weapon that can be used in politics. And Bush is brandishing this weapon like no other, using it without concern of the consequences. He knows that people will respond to it; every terror alert he issues, no matter how flagrantly false, buys him votes. It’s a win-win strategy: if there is an attack, he looks justified in warning us, no matter how misdirected that warning would be; if there is no attack, it looks like he prevented it. And as few who are fooled want to think they’ve been fooled, he can herd great portions of the public in his direction in the knowledge they will continue to flock toward the voting block.

Don’t allow fear to influence your political decisions. Don’t accept simply what you see and hear from the television media–the print and web media tends to have more information, better grounded–use Google News to help find your sources, not Fox or their wannabe-twin CNN. And vote based on the facts, not the hype.

I myself have a fear: that Bush and the GOP are just too damned good at lying, cheating, and stealing elections. But that’s not what is driving my vote. It is, however, driving my determination to stop what I regard as the greatest threat to America since Joe McCarthy: Bush and Cheney.

From the 12th to the 14th centuries, Japan was ruled from Kamakura by the Minamoto shoguns. Today, it’s a seaside resort (near Enoshima), and is famed for having a large, outdoor statue of Buddha. And that’s where I went last Friday with a friend. After enjoying some really good noodles (they make ’em in front of you) at a shop in Yokohama’s Chinatown, we headed over to Kamakura in the hopes that maybe the on-and-off Typhoon (#10) weather would clear well enough so we could enjoy the beach. Alas, no–even though we reached the beach and the sun was out, the waves were too high; a red flag was flying, meaning you can’t go in there, bub. And laying on the beach didn’t work too well, either–the sun was just too danged hot to stay under it for too long.

Still, we enjoyed the town, and went to the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine, where the photos below were taken, save the last one. We didn’t go to the shrine per se, but visited the lotus flower gardens named after the Heike and the Minamoto (two clans that battled each other), each with different-colored lotus flowers. The place has quite a bit of wildlife–the trees are filled with herons, large white long-necked birds, and the ponds are inhabited by rather lively turtles that come up out of the pond when people come to feed them.

While taking a leisurely walk around the neighborhood, we came across a shop with a rather imposing name:

And we took a side trip when we saw direction to a temple called “Komyoji,” supposedly one kilometer distant. However, despite following directions, we never found it–only new signs to other temples and shrines, which we decided not to follow. After all, “fool me once, shame on me, fool me, can’t get fooled again.” Or something like that.

But what we did find was a local temple that had this rather imposing fellow guarding the outside. He seemed rather annoyed to be having visitors, so we quickly prayed and skedaddled.

One of the topics that came up from seeing the Heike pond, by the way, was the Heike Crab. It’s a crab found in Japan with the face of a scowling samurai on its carapace. I remember first seeing it in Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series quite a while back, as an example of accidental forced evolution. The idea is that of the crab that were being collected by the fishermen, one had a mutation that made its carapace look a little like a face. Superstitious, the fishermen who caught this crab and its descendants threw it back–so it survived and reproduced, more than the others. Over time, successive mutations made the face more and more like a scowling face of a samurai, the best carapace a crab could wish to have to avoid being eaten.

The legend of the crabs is that they were created after a terrible water-borne battle between the Heike and Minamoto clans, which the Heike lost. The dead samurai, lost to the waters, are said to have be reborn as the crabs–hence the name “Heike Crab.” The crabs with the human faces happened to emerge in that area at about that time. And it was that battle which led to Minamoto dominance and the beginning of the Kamakura Era.

Just a little fun fact there.

“It’s election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger’s campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.

“When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.”

That’s the beginning of Paul Krugman’s most recent article in the New York Times, describing his view of the perils of voting machines. This article in The Nation has even more disturbing information on how your vote could be changed, erased, or outnumbered by false votes with frightening ease.

Ironically, the vote fraud in the 2000 election–particularly in Florida–was supposed to bring about reform, but instead has thrown open the doors far wider to fraud under the “cure” of electronic voting. Pitched to the public as a way to make voting easier to understand so that the “butterfly ballot” fiasco in Florida would not happen again, the machines being set up as we speak do indeed solve that problem–but they open an even more dangerous threat to accurate counts: no means of verification. At least the votes in Florida could have been recounted had the Supreme Court not shut down the definitive count. But with computer ballots, it’ll only be the malleable, easily-tampered-with electronic number, and if anyone doubts its veracity, there will be no recount. Because it won’t be possible.

Here’s how it might work. You go to vote. You and so many others in your area leave your votes on the voting machine, which shows you verification only on a monitor; when you leave the booth, the monitor is wiped. You get recorded as having voted–but there’s no physical record of the vote. It’s all ones and zeroes on the machine. It might be that a bit later, a representative of the company that makes the machines (a company whose owner is a Bush campaign manager, no less) comes up to that machine, and as Krugman described, starts fiddling with it–and presto, votes are changed. Fraud you call–but can you prove it? Not a chance. Another form of fraud might be even harder to spot. The software which runs the machines could be tampered with beforehand, completely out of your site. It could be set to do anything, such as to count votes for one candidate double and for the other candidate half–or just completely make up numbers based on whatever scheme the programmer wishes. If the computer is programmed the right way, all evidence of fraudulent programming could erase itself afterwards.

And those committing the fraud can just deny it, as it will be near impossible to prove, and if they are caught, they can just call it an honest error. Think they could never do that? Just look at Florida. In not one, but two presidential elections, a list of voters to be removed from the voter rolls was fraudulently compiled by the Republican administration in that state, both times flagrant, both times proven as dishonest–and both times called an “honest mistake” and no one was prosecuted. That’s a case where something a lot more blatant than electronic voter fraud was committed, and not only did they get away scot free, they tried it twice and still no one is being prosecuted! Why not? Because the party in power is the one doing the fraud, and the party in power has the attorney general who gets to decide what crimes will be prosecuted.

This coming November, if nothing is done to stop them, up to 2 million votes will be counted on these machines and will automatically be suspect. What happens if the e-votes suspiciously tilt towards Bush, who wins by a small margin? Will there be proof? Nope. No paper trail. Even if fraud is proven beyond any doubt whatsoever, will the results be thrown out and a new election held? Of course not. The constitution did not provide for this, and mandates a decision within a certain time frame. So even if we know Bush did not win and there was massive fraud, once again we will likely throw up our hands and in the name of stability and avoiding a constitutional crisis, we will again agree to let a man who was not elected take office and power for another four years.

But you can stop that. Call your local election official. Ask if electronic voting machines will be used. And if they say “yes,” then get off your ass and find out how the votes will be verified. The only system that can work is that with independent paper verification. In other words, when the voter casts his or her vote, not only does the vote register in the machine, but a slip of paper prints out with the voter’s choices on it, and that vote is both checked by the voter for accuracy, and is given to the official in charge and kept in case a recount is called for.

Anything less, and you should immediately take action to remove ALL electronic voting in your district. You have to act, though–just reading about it or talking about it will not accomplish anything; if there is fraud, the other side will simply say that you did not object in any official manner, and you’ll be screwed. So do it, and contact people you know in other areas and have them do it.

Do it NOW.

I’m not kidding.