Quote of the Day in Chee Versus Lee & Lee as reported in Todayonline:
Another question from Dr Chee [to Mr. Lee Kuan Yew]: Isn’t it presumptuous that “without this entire government, we would not be here” when in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea “people thrive without you and your system”?
Categories: Politics
I found a website for all of Liang Qichao’s writings in Chinese. Pretty Cool for anybody interested in one of the key intellectuals during the 1890s reform era till the early Republican years in China.
http://www.yifan.net/yihe/novels/classic/lqcwj/lqc.html
Quote of the Day:
民族自由与否，大半原于政治，故此二者其界限常相混。 - 梁启超在论自由（1902年5月8日、22日） Whether a nationality (or people) are free, largely depends on Politics (or Politicking), thus it is no wonder that these two elements' boundaries are often blurred. - Liang Qichao on "Discussing Freedom" (May 8th, 22 1902)
Categories: Uncategorized
Will John McCain choose the unexpected candidate in terms of Bobby Jindal? Will an Indian-America shatter the glass ceiling in American politics by becoming John McCain’s running mate?
Bobby Jindal was awarded one of the most influential people of 2007 by Times Magazine
Newsweek was speculating this decision a while ago!
McCain Hopes to Fill Ticket, 3 people steps up
Senator John McCain of Arizona is set to meet with at least three potential running mates at a gathering at his ranch this weekend in Arizona, suggesting that he is stepping up his search for a vice-presidential candidate as the Democratic contest heads toward a conclusion, according to Republicans familiar with Mr. McCain’s plans.
Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a onetime rival for the Republican nomination, have all accepted invitations to visit Mr. McCain at his ranch in Sedona, Republicans said.
Categories: American Politics
Hillary speaks after her Kentucky Win
Categories: American Politics
“She’s likeable enough” - Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton
“How do we beat the bitch?” - Someone asking John McCain at a campaign event
Excellent article in the NY Times on sexism in this rancorous Democratic primary- I wonder if Singapore will ever see a women Prime Minister or a non-Chinese PM?
Gender Issue Lives On as Clinton’s Hopes Dim
By JODI KANTOR
With each passing day, it seems a little less likely that the next president of the United States will wear a skirt — or a cheerful, no-nonsense pantsuit.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now in what most agree are the waning days of her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. To use her own phrase, she has been running “to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling” in American life, and now the presidency — even a nomination that once seemed to be hers to claim — seems out of reach.
Along with the usual post-mortems about strategy, message and money, Mrs. Clinton’s all-but-certain defeat brings with it a reckoning about what her run represents for women: a historic if incomplete triumph or a depressing reminder of why few pursue high office in the first place.
The answers have immediate political implications. If many of Mrs. Clinton’s legions of female supporters believe she was undone even in part by gender discrimination, how eagerly will they embrace Senator Barack Obama, the man who beat her?
“Women felt this was their time, and this has been stolen from them,” said Marilu Sochor, 48, a real estate agent in Columbus, Ohio, and a Clinton supporter. “Sexism has played a really big role in the race.”
Not everyone agrees. “When people look at the arc of the campaign, it will be seen that being a woman, in the end, was not a detriment and if anything it was a help to her,” the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said in an interview. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is faltering, she added, because of “strategic, tactical things that have nothing to do with her being a woman.”
As a former first lady whose political career evolved from her husband’s, Mrs. Clinton was always an imperfect test case for female achievement — “somebody’s wife,” as Elaine Kamarck, a professor of government at Harvard and a Clinton supporter, described her.
Still, many credit Mrs. Clinton with laying down a new marker for what a woman can accomplish in a campaign — raising over $170 million, frequently winning more favorable reviews on debate performances than her male rivals, rallying older women, and persuading white male voters who were never expected to support her.
“She’s raised this whole woman candidate thing to a whole different level than when I ran,” said Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton supporter and the first woman to be the vice-presidential nominee of a major party, contrasting her own brief stint as a running mate in 1984 with Mrs. Clinton’s 17-month-and-counting slog.
Ms. Goodwin and others say Mrs. Clinton was able to convert the sexism she faced on the trail into votes and donations, extending the life of a candidacy that suffered a serious blow at the Iowa caucuses. Like so many women before, she was heckled (in New Hampshire, a few men told her to iron their shirts) and called nasty names (“How do we beat the bitch?” Senator John McCain was asked at one campaign event).
Categories: Uncategorized
WP organizing secretary Yaw Shin Leong revealed that he voted for MP Teo.
Thinking broadly, it might appear to be a good strategy by Yaw to explain his decision. In fact, it might not be something altogether new. Mr. Low Thia Khiang does vote with the government on issues in parliament, and he has mentioned repeatedly that the role of the opposition is to be a watch dog and not to be a mad dog that “opposes for opposing sake.”
However, could the issue of Yaw’s decision to reveal his voting choice be one of that of a absence of context to the public? Yaw’s vote for Teo is different from Low’s vote for a PAP introduced bill - the former could be seen as an electoral decision that encapsulates broad (if not vague) manifestos, while the latter is a specific bill for specific purposes.
Yet, some would argue in the context of the larger WP’s strategy, his vote makes sense because it contributes to the longstanding notion in recent years that the WP could move to the political center to try to capture the 10% swing vote that will propel WP to electoral victory. This is underpinned by the P-R that WP has done over the year, blending a fiery past which appeals to the liberal (think JBj and Francis Seow) and a semi-collaboration path with the PAP to appeal to the moderates and conservatives.
Yet, this decision by Yaw might prove ultimately to be divisive because the context is made unclear. Yaw chose to delink the notion that the sum of individual interests equals to national public interests. Rather, Yaw chose to argue that in the spirit of the limited public interests (as to that of Bukit Panjang), the PAP candidate was a better choice. By transcending partisanship (even though he calls himself a partisan), Yaw could have been trying to present himself along the general lines of the WP’s image - a party that is semi-collaborative to the ruling regime that focuses squarely and firmly on the policy issues.
The historical irony too might emerge in this debate. Did the PM not argue that people were voting for parties, rather than individual candidates after he was interviewed by reporters after the AMK GRC results were out? I am not sure the WP, or for that matter, SDP or SDA would disagree with the PM. Some political analysts disagreed, saying the people voted for individual candidates, which technically is not wrong either. This ambiguous relationship between voting for a party and for a local candidate has served Singapore political parties well. Yet in this incident, by not leaving room for the alternative, could Yaw be going against the nationalization of issues undertaken by Sylvia Lim (recall she said, this is not a local election, but a national one + the overall WP’s decision to have one stadium rally instead of SDA’s traditional strategies of having multiple venues)? Of course, Singaporeans’ memories are short, but the debate over whether one votes for a party or a candidate based on national or local issues would not go away, as long as we have elections in Singapore
Yet, how many Singaporeans would understand their contextualized strategies, and how explicit can the WP be without sounding too earnest? The reports of the mainstream press and the sammyboy forums could have work better in the realm of nuances, but the emotionality of the collective guilt and hopes of Singaporeans could not be helped by their descriptions. By purging the body politic of the greys, the purity of the alternative vision will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of our collective and instrumental past. Would Yaw become the ash ?
More interestingly,Yaw brings up the PAP’s dictonomy of pro versus anti-Singapore, that is the transcendental public interests (akin to the constitutional dilemmas of Modern China) matters more in politics. Politicking and partisanship should be limited in view of the wider interests of the imagined community. Is it a direct repudiation of the SDP’s strategy of community politicking in the forms of semi- demonstrations (versus the apparent neutrality and connotations of unity in the form of “walkabouts”)?
My sympathies lie more perhaps with Mr. Low and Miss Lim as well as PAP MP Teo. For Low and Lim, how to sound democratic, a little distancing from Yaw and still pursue this middle of road strategy in parliament in a big question in the coming days. For Teo, a WP’s vote may sound flattering, but his position with the PAP will change - either he will be lauded as the new moderate PAP or criticized internally as the new softies.
Categories: Politics · Society
Two interesting remarks coming out for pro-immigration and immigration reforms in America. Quite refreshing to hear Gov. of California and the NYT as contrast to the Lou Dobbs of CNN.
Immigrant restrictionism is stiffing hundreds of thousands of American citizens and legal residents out of their tax-rebate checks.
Hard-liners were so intent on keeping the cash out of the hands of undocumented workers that they restricted the rebate to people with Social Security numbers. An Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, issued by the Internal Revenue Service to people who pay taxes but do not qualify for Social Security numbers, will not do. If a married couple files jointly, and one spouse is not eligible for the rebate, neither gets the money.
This hurts all manner of people who are working and paying taxes: American soldiers stationed abroad who happen to have married foreigners; high-tech immigrants in Silicon Valley and other places whose spouses are not authorized to work or have not yet had their paperwork processed. These are people who are perfectly legal, economically vital and politically inconvenient.
The government should fix the law so spouses get their money. It is a technical repair that even this Congress should manage. But why shouldn’t undocumented immigrants with taxpayer numbers get the cash too? The checks are not rewards for good behavior; they are taxes returned as a means to an end. Illegal immigrants constitute about 5 percent of the work force and earn much less than the native-born. They are just the sort of group the stimulus should be aimed at, if the purpose is to get the most economic bang for every rebate dollar.
Arguments like that do not fly in the polluted atmosphere of immigration politics, which has produced toxic byproducts so extreme that they make the rebate glitch seem like a mere annoyance.
Industries across the country are suffering and crops are rotting for lack of workers. Congress is debating a national right-to-work system that could mistakenly ensnare countless Americans and seriously overburden the Social Security bureaucracy. Federal agents and local police officers around the nation are rounding up the usual immigrants.
Such crackdowns have forced thousands of harmless people into a fast-growing, secretive detention system that is shockingly deficient in basic rights and decent health care. In a disturbing article, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the United States government had injected hundreds of undocumented foreigners with mind-altering drugs to render them docile while they were being deported. This practice violates every imaginable standard of decency, not to mention a few international laws and treaties.
Smart efforts to minimize the ill effects of illegal immigration die political deaths, meanwhile, like putting the undocumented into New York State’s motor-vehicle database, registered and insured instead of anonymous and unaccounted for. That was also the fate of the Dream Act, a modest bill to ease the way to college for the guiltless children of illegal immigrants so they would not be condemned to dead-end jobs. A model identity-card program in New Haven, hailed for lowering crime, is under legal attack from nativist groups.
Efforts at deliberate, proportionate and responsible immigration reform provoke paralysis, but restrictionist tactics are greeted with exuberance. The itch to do something about illegal immigration is being scratched. Note to country: Scratching never cured anything.
Interview with LA Times:
Schwarzenegger: I get a lot of requests from the chamber and from businesses to push for immigration reform. And we get a lot of push about, you know, the problem that if we don’t have immigration reform, and we are very tough on the border - which we are in California, we have the National Guard there - and because of that, it reduced the crossings. But because of that, a lot of businesses are suffering now. So what everyone likes is not to have illegals working for them; but what they like is to have the chance to go and hire these people legally. But they don’t get the visas because there’s a cap on that … so it’s a very frustrating system, and it’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for the Mexicans, it’s not good for us, it’s not good for our businesses, and especially with the chaos of the students’ visas.
We have students that are studying from all over the world, and then the next day they have to go home. I think it’s crazy for them not to have a visa so they can stay a few years and so we can use their brain power that they actually got in California or in the United States and use them here for a few years and then let them go home. They want to stay here and we need them. That’s one of the most common complaints in Silicon Valley.
(more…)
Categories: Immigration · World
Recently, I have become interested in the relationship between popular Chinese/Asian music and the notion of a Chinese/Asian “public space.” One of the things that people laugh at, including many journalists and academicians, is that Asian popular music and its political, societal and leisure implications is a topic actually worth studying. Considering that millions of East Asians, from Indonesians to Vietnamese to China to Japan to Korea sing karaoke and take part in singing competitions everyday, and that politicians have become apt at singing many of these popular songs to win votes, I don’t know how long journalists and academicians can laugh at this “trivial, similar and subaltern culture”. Also many young Asians grow up with a favorite idol and many of them would actually sacrifice their daily lives to chase these idols across space and time when they are growing up. What did it mean to grow up with popular idols? How does the transnational nature of Chinese music unite or divide the Chinese and its diaspora? What did it mean to belong to a “fan club”? How is popular musicians and music used by politicians (recall Zhang Hui Mei’s ban from Mainland China after she sang the Taiwan’s national anthem) to promote their own agenda? Why have popular musicians, with their huge following, remain largely apolitical or have chosen to support the ruling regime? How have musicians be co-opted into the political system? These issues deserve some serious thinking and research.
Clearly these young people in their millions are not necessarily engaging in a public discourse within a Habermas’s public sphere in terms of their interests in popular Asian music, but something is going on that is beyond the control of the state. For e.g., A ban of certain artists in Malaysia, Singapore, China, Vietnam, Indonesia has never fail to draw the people’s criticism or support towards the ruling authority.
To digress, it is interesting to see Sun Yan Zi’s song “我不難過” (I am not upset) being sang by so many different artists, predominately Taiwanese singers. The transnational nature of Chinese popular music can indeed be reproduced in many ways. For a lighter amd normative question, who do you think sang better?
