For Chinese, U.S. election is ‘entertaining’

adrienne mong, nbc news producer

BEIJING Last week, three books about Barack Obama were published in China to little fanfare.

Despite being prominently displayed inside one of Beijing’s larger bookstores, the books two were his own and the third was a collection of his speeches and writings attracted little interest the day we visited.

The shop clerk said sales were “healthy” for a new release, but “The No. 1 Bodyguard in China,” a biography of a former Chinese security guard, sitting next to “The Audacity of Hope,” drew more curiosity. No books by John McCain were available; apparently his writings have yet to be translated into Chinese.

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“At the average person’s level in China, I’ve just found [the U.S. presidential election] to be less interesting than any other thing the Olympics, the earthquake, other things going on in China that are of huge historical importance to China itself,” observed James Fallows, who’s been based here for two years writing for The Atlantic Monthly.

Apart from the events he mentioned, there were also the winter storms that paralyzed half the country; the Tibet riots; torch relay protests; violence in Xinjiang; and now the melamine-tainted milk scandal. No surprise then that most Chinese have been focusing on domestic events.

But, as usual when it comes to China, it’s never that simple. As we talked to people about the American election, we found varying levels of interest and curiosity.

…(read more)

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Hi Ho Civic! Honda’s Musical Road is Tonto

From the Autopia “Most Annoying Promotion Ever” department comes a dispatch from Lancaster, California. Honda’s guerilla marketers joined up with the Lancaster highway department and cut grooves into the pavement of a remote stretch of Avenue K. Far from ordinary rumble strips, this particular pavement modification caused a car’s tires to resonate in a way that sounded like the William Tell Overture (yes, that’s the theme to “The Lone Ranger”). Honda claimed the music sounded best when “played” on a new Civic driving exactly 55 miles per hour.

Lancaster residents disagreed, which is why we’re writing about it in the past tense. By the time you read this the “musical road” will have been paved over, leaving only a YouTube video after the jump to remember it by.

For all the poorly chosen music we hear blasting from elaborate in-car sound systems these days, it’s easy to see how Honda’s groovin’ pavement seemed like a good idea at the time. Let the road dictate the tunes, and let the car play them. Word has it that the Bee Gees were inspired to adopt the disco sound after enjoying the “beat” of driving over a wooden bridge crossing Biscayne Bay, which eventually became the rhythm guitar in “Jive Talkin’”.

We imagine the dusty brown landscape of Lancaster’s outmost reaches conjures up images of a certain Wild West hero. Just, not in the middle of the night, or so loudly. Now the only masked men Lancaster residents want to thank are the fine folks of the paving crews restoring Avenue K to its former tone-deaf status. “When you hear it late at night, it will wake you up from a sound sleep. It’s awakened my wife three or four times a night,” Lancaster resident Brian Robin told the Los Angeles Daily News. “We thought it was far enough away,” Antelope Valley Film Office liason Pauline East told the Daily News. Who knew that the sort of folks who move to remote areas don’t like to be bothered by strange noises, not to mention city-dwellin’ tourists crowding their streets with Honda Civics? Honda officials apologized to all who complained, including some who lived as far away as a half mile from the musical road and still heard it. Still, we imagine that Lancaster residents wouldn’t complain about Honda’s previous So Cal guerilla marketing campaign, which had Honda employees pumping free gas and carrying groceries.

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Photo courtesy Flickr user jillnjer

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Bush ‘remarkably unaffected’ by time

by James Gerstenzang

For eight years, Stephen J. Hadley has observed President Bush up close.

As the president’s national security advisor throughout the second term, and on many occasions before that as the deputy national security advisor, Hadley has traveled the world with the president, has cleared brush with him in Crawford, and briefed him daily on developments around the world.

He was there for discussions leading up to the surge in Iraq. Afghanistan? 9/11? North Korea? Iran? Hugo Chavez? Human rights and the Beijing Olympics? Russia? Georgia? All were in his portfolio.

If the word “crisis” was attached to it — save, perhaps, for the stock market and Katrina — it is only a slight exaggeration to say there’s a good chance the debate went through Hadley’s office at the northwest corner of the White House West Wing.

The vantage point for tracking the president could hardly be better.

Bush, Hadley said today, is “remarkably unaffected by eight years as president in terms of who he is, what he stands for, what he thinks of himself.”

He spoke with a small group of reporters in the Roosevelt Room, across a small corridor from the Oval Office. This report comes from Countdown to Crawford, at the L.A. Times.

He was responding to a question about whether in its second term the administration had adopted a more pragmatic and less ideological approach to both foreign policy and economic matters, compared with the first term.

Will a federal bailout work?

“Situations change,” Hadley said, referring specifically to the Middle East, which he said was “a very different place” these days compared with 2001. Therefore, he said, the way the administration approaches it has naturally undergone change.

Of course no presidential aide wants to say the boss has eased back on his core principles. Nor would one want to say that the boss had not grown and adapted over eight years.

Hadley put it this way: “We’ve tried to be flexible. We’ve tried to learn.”

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Kentucky Air Guard Troops Deploy to Coastal Texas

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by publicize force capt. dale greer - about 25 pararescuemen, combat controllers and support troops from the kentucky air guard’s 123rd inimitable tactics squadron began deploying to coastal texas today to conduct let go free operations for victims of cyclone ike.

Rescue crews race clock to find, save Ike victims

galveston, texas — rescue crews canvassed neighborhoods inundated by ike’s storm eddy early sunday morning, racing against time to save those who disgorge a second harrowing night trapped amid flattened houses, strewn debris and downed power lines.

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North Korea And The Random Imperialist Media Outlets (Seriously, Vice?) They Allow In [Field Guide]

It is not easy to get news out of the North Koreans. The story of Kim Jong-Il’s probable stroke was broken to CNN by someone at the CIA, but that is about all anyone knows. According to the Wall Street Journal, current and former US officials say they’re “largely flying blind in trying to understand who might replace Kim Jong Il. And as an expert pointed out to today’s Washington Post: “We don’t know diddly about what is going on inside that closed country.” But that’s going a little far: there are actually a few things we know about North Korea, because every year the hermit kingdom invites a few journalists to see its glorious spectacle of self-reliance, and every year we read the resulting works of journalism and think “Well who in the name of Engels let that guy in?”

[Image via North Korea Propaganda posters, which is an awesome site.]

Last year the Stalinist hermit state played host to journalists from Vice and Parade, among more serious reporters like CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. And they allowed this one crazy graphic novelist in! As Kim Jong-Il told Madeline Albright eight years ago: “I know I’m an object of criticism in the world, but if I’m being talked about, I must be doing the right things.” Think we have pinpointed the inspiration for the Spencer Pratt public relations strategy?

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frailty 2007, for its photo distribution. oh good grief, who subcontract out those guys get in? unclear. somehow they managed to get on the roster to obscure the 2007 airirang abundance games following several months of subsidize-and-forth, but while north korean officials leftist numberless of their colleagues at a consulate somewhere in “northern china,” vice’s shane smith and jamie-james medina ingratiated themselves to officials by getting drunk and joining a nationalist singalong with some north korean girls. important findings: they are amid the only 15 spectators at the games, which feature 100,000 competitors. they find it impossible to determine whether anyone truly believes, or is simply lying with respect to believing, all the shit they shovel nearby how north korea is a glorious country whose make of self-reliance is the jealousy of all the world. at the terminus of the museum travel, you obligated to make public on a tie before entering the final room, where you are permitted to believe a wax sculpture the chinese made of the great chieftain kim il-sung. you have to crush to the statue and speak in a soup?on. after us, these korean women came out of the graven image room bawling their eyes out. they’d met their true bossman. we were like, “come on, it’s a wax statue.” but to them, it’s almost like they’ve really met him. they save up legal tender their whole obsession to come to the museum done up in all their finery, tiptoe up to this caryatid, and cry their eyes out. and it’s really kind of a shitty statue too. identical of the guys we were with said it looked opposite number an old 1950s ad for hemorrhoid cream or something. he was right. it was sub-madame tussaud’s eminence. (oh, and they had a rodomontade machine blowing its hair, like it was basking in a gentle draught. we are not kidding.)

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parade 2007, for its “who is the world’s worst dictator?” issue how did they get in? contributing editor david wallechinsky is the vice president of the international society of olympic historians, so he could apply under a slightly less hard-hitting guise than wave. description findings: basketball is popular in north korea, according to wallechinsky’s heedful, because kim jong-il says “playing basketball will make us taller,” he notes, adding that “reports roughly that 7-year-old north korean boys are 8 inches shorter than their south korean counterparts.”

pyongyang, a 2005 graphic novel by french canadian cartoonist guy delisle how’d that lampoon give someone the run-around b cajole in? on a work visa from a french canadian zest following that, mindblowingly, outsources animation work to pyongyang. key findings:

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A Palin Hack Two-fer

it’s not surprising to glom rachael larimore make excuses for palin’s baldfaced lies about the bridge to nowhere by 1)carefully omitting her actual statements (she didn’t merely demand to have “nixed” the project) and then 2)claiming that all politicians “exaggerate” anyway. distorting and then making up reasons to ignore palin’s egregious howlers is by any more as natural to her apologists as breathing. having at least half-conceded that mccain’s central selling point in favor of palin is bogus, however, i fancy she needed to duplicate one undiluted palin myth. in the future, larimore discusses “that private jet that palin sold on ebay.” again, the facts here are not complex:mccain and palin are mendacity about “selling the jet on ebay” just as they’re lying approximately the bridge to nowhere. whether larimore is lying or simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about i can’t say. and needless to say, larimore’s argument that pointing unserviceable palin’s lies is some kind of betrayal of feminism is categorically risible.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush could announce as soon as Tuesday that he wants to withdraw one combat brigade of about 4,000 troops from Iraq early next year, leaving force levels largely unchanged until he leaves office.

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White House spokeswoman Dana Perino would not comment on the substance of Bush's plan but said it would likely be announced this week.

"I think it's probable that you'll hear it this week, possibly as early as tomorrow — I should say likely, even probable tomorrow," Perino said on Monday.

Top U.S. defense officials recommended the plan to Bush last week. Pentagon sources have said the plan includes withdrawing one combat brigade from Iraq early next year.

Bush, who has seen his job approval rating sink because of the prolonged war, could to make his announcement when he speaks at the National Defense University in Washington at 9:55 a.m. EDT on Tuesday.

There are 146,000 troops in Iraq and 33,000 in Afghanistan. U.S. Army combat brigades in Iraq typically have around 3,500 to 4,000 soldiers, according to defense officials.

Three Pentagon sources told Reuters last week that Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, had agreed to shift from 15 brigades to 14 in that war zone. Two sources said the change would not take place until early next year.

Additionally, according to a senior U.S. defense official, one Marine battalion would be withdrawn from Iraq and its replacement would go this November to Afghanistan where Taliban and al Qaeda militant attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces have increased over two years.

While violence in Iraq has dropped dramatically in the past year, the proposed cutback is smaller than some analysts had predicted,

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WASILLA, Alaska (CNN) — It was the night before Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was to accept the Republican vice presidential nomination in a nationally televised speech, and Becky Moore couldn’t sleep a wink.

Dr. Curt Menard, Gov. Sarah Palin’s family friend and childhood dentist, looks over her high school yearbook.

more photos »

She paced around her room and prayed before sending Palin an e-mail wishing her good luck.

"I was so nervous for her," said Moore, a dietitian who lives in Palin’s hometown of Wasilla. "I felt like she was my relative, like she was about to prove herself to the country."

As much as Moore was hoping for the best, there was a part of her that didn’t want to share her governor and former mayor with the lower 48, a term Alaskans use to refer to their distant countrymen with a mix of playfulness and disdain.

"No matter what happens, we win. If she becomes vice president, the rest of the country will see what a great leader she is. If she loses, we get her back," Moore said.

The night after Palin’s speech, Moore and friends from her book club gathered at Wasilla’s Pandemonium bookstore to discuss the Jeffrey Eugenides novel "Middlesex."

But instead, the conversation centered on the poise and bravura with which Palin explained her views on resource development — another Alaska term for oil and gas drilling — family values, fighting corruption and reducing the role of government in private lives.

Watch why some say Palin may overshadow Sen. John McCain »

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"As a longtime Alaskan, she makes me proud. She’s sophisticated and intelligent. She can wear bunny boots and high heels and be comfortable in both," said Paula Esche, a retired teacher who moved to Alaska from Wisconsin in 1963.

Indeed, with each proverbial crack Palin has made in Alaska’s political landscape, the story of her rise from hometown girl to political upshot has been retold over and over again in the Alaskan press and some national publications, including Vogue.

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To many, Palin’s iconic status is well-deserved, considering that the high school basketball star, former beauty queen and television journalist rose from Wasilla

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