HUGE PRO-INDEPENDENCE PROTESTS IN TAIWAN: This won’t play well with the Chinese.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire emails:

On Taiwan, I am just thinking of Lucy Liu, and realizing that Taiwan will be unstoppable if they play the “protest babe” card.

Is it OK for me to be deeply sympathetic and deeply scared?

OTOH, their problem with Taiwan may become our opportunity with No Korea –they help us, we help them…

Condi had *really* better get this one right.

Indeed.

TODAY WAS NORMAN BORLAUG’S 91ST BIRTHDAY: As the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who probably did the most good, and who probably gets the least credit therefor, he deserves the tribute that Jay Solo posted. Gregg Easterbrook’s excellent article on Borlaug has been moved behind The Atlantic’s subscriber wall, but you can read this article for a sense of his accomplishments.

UPDATE: You can read the Easterbrook article for free here.

WOMEN IN COMBAT: They seem to be doing pretty well at it, judging by this after-action report reproduced by Blackfive. Most amusingly, the insurgents were videoing the raid, and the captured video is available. Perhaps we can offer it to Al Jazeera.

UPDATE: After reading that after-action report, it’s hard to take this column by Jed Babbin very seriously. He’s fighting the last war; the women in the report are winning the current one.

BAD NEWS FROM BELARUS:

Belarusian demonstrators tried to rally outside the office of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday to demand his ouster in a self-declared attempt to emulate a popular uprising in Kyrgyzstan, but they were beaten back by riot police swinging truncheons.

The Belarusian Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, harshly assailed the Kyrgyz opposition, warning that protests that drove longtime leader Askar Akayev from power this week could destabilize the entire region.

Lukashenko, who has largely retained the Soviet system and hasn’t changed the name of the KGB in his country of 10 million, has stifled dissent, persecuted independent media and opposition parties, and prolonged his power through elections that international organizations say were marred by fraud.

He’s not going to go easily.

UPDATE: As one of Daniel Drezner’s commenters noted, “not enough hot chicks.”

Yeah, if Salma Hayek had been protesting, things would have been different. And Dan would have had many, many posts.

BILL QUICK seems to have decided that it may be worth trying to salvage the Democratic Party after all.

“IRAQ’S INSURGENTS SEEK EXIT STRATEGY:” Heh. Indeed.

DEMONSTRATIONS TAKING PLACE “ALL OVER IRAN?” Reports of this sort of thing have tended to be overoptimistic in the past, but this bears watching. I certainly hope it’s true.

WHAT’S NEXT IN THE ‘STANS? Gateway Pundit looks at how events in Kyrgyzstan are playing in neighboring regions.

MIKE KREMPASKY finds an earlier draft of the FEC regulatory proposal for the Internet, and concludes that Brad Smith is owed an apology.

I APPRECIATE Andrew Sullivan’s quoting me, but he’s wrong: Unlike Andrew, I don’t think that America is in danger of being taken over by religious Zealots, constituting an American Taliban and bent on establishing theocracy. I think that — despite their occasionally abusive emails (and most aren’t abusive, just upset) — the people that Mickey Kaus is calling “pro-tubists” are well-meaning, sincere, and possessed of an earnest desire to do good. I don’t think that they’re nascent Mullah Omars, and I think that calling them that just makes the problem worse. This is a tragedy, and it’s become a circus. Name-calling just makes you one of the clowns.

But I do think that process, and the Constitution, matter. Trampling the Constitution in an earnest desire to do good in high-profile cases has been a hallmark of a certain sort of liberalism, and it’s the sort of thing that I thought conservatives eschewed. If I were in charge of making the decision, I might well put the tube back and turn Terri Schiavo over to her family. But I’m not, and the Florida courts are, and they seem to have done a conscientious job. Maybe they came to the right decision, and maybe they didn’t. But respecting their role in the system, and not rushing to overturn all the rules because we don’t like the outcome, seems to me to be part of being a member of civilized society rather than a mob. As I say, I thought conservatives knew this.

UPDATE: I very strongly recommend this post by Donald Sensing, who doesn’t sound like one of the American Taliban to me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More evidence of why this process stuff matters:

MIAMI – Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo wasn’t to be removed from her hospice, a team of Florida law enforcement agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted – but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge’s order, The Miami Herald has learned. . . .

For a brief period, local police, who have officers around the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called a showdown.

In the end, the state agents and the Department of Children and Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.

It’s good that things didn’t escalate as they might have. Shooting matches between different law-enforcement agencies are real banana-republic stuff, and that’s what you get when you ignore the rules.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES IS UP! Enjoy it!

MORE ON KYRGYZSTAN HERE, with photos here.

TRADE DRESS MATTERS: I thought I was buying one of these at Target the other day, but it was lookalike knockoff and I didn’t notice. Dang. Yes, I should have looked more closely at the package, but I was in a hurry, and I thought I knew what I was getting. Interestingly, it’s a mistake you probably wouldn’t make shopping online.

AN UNAUTHORIZED RALLY IN MINSK: “Members of Belarussian opposition parties and movements and entrepreneurs have joined an unauthorized rally in downtown Minsk to show their support for previously arrested opposition activists and entrepreneurial movement leaders, an Interfax correspondent reported.” Three or four hundred people, it’s reported.

ANN ALTHOUSE:

I watched a number of the cable TV news analysis shows last night (and in the last few days), and I am appalled at the failure even to raise the most basic legal point about the statute Congress passed. Time after time, I heard people — like Fred Barnes on Fox News’s “Special Report” — say that everyone knows that Congress intended to give Terri Schiavo a de novo hearing, in which the federal court would disregard everything the state courts have done, and that the federal courts ignored the statute that Congress went to such extraordinary lengths to pass. . . .

Regardless of what people like Barnes think Congress intended, the federal courts were given a statutory text to follow, and the fact is they followed that text. Yet the TV commentators — at least what I heard — never made this most basic point. . . . The federal courts in no way flouted the federal statute. It’s irrelevant that Congress managed to make people think it was doing things that it never put in the statutory text.

Actually, I made that point on Kudlow last night, noting that Congress enacted a procedural statute, in the hopes of getting a substantive result. But this point keeps getting missed. It’s also worth noting — as Ann does — that the parents’ case was simply quite weak on the law. I thought conservatives were supposed to care about the law, but I see a lot of people being as result-oriented as, well, liberals are supposed to be . . . .

UPDATE: Jonathan Adler observes:

Congress knew how to require a stay — indeed a prior draft of the legislation included language that would have required a stay — but such language was not in the final statute. Quoting one, ten or twenty legislators doesn’t change this fact. The 11th Circuit panel was required to review the district court’s decision for abuse of discretion — a very demanding standard — and the majority properly exercised that obligation. This does not mean there was no injustice in the Florida courts, only that there was not a federal constitutional violation.

I’m quite astonished to hear people who call themselves conservatives arguing, in effect, that Congress and the federal courts have a free-ranging charter to correct any injustice, anywhere, regardless of the Constitution. And yet my email runneth over with just those kinds of comments. And arguing that “it’s okay because liberals do it too” doesn’t undercut my point that conservatives are acting like liberals here. It makes it.

Every system generates unjust results. This may (or may not) be one of them, but there’s no reason to think that Congressional action on an individual legal case is likely to improve things. My lefty law professors used to think that more procedures were always better, and seemed willing to tie the Constitution and the rules of procedure into knots to get to the result they liked. Even they have learned, to a degree, that more procedure doesn’t necessarily lead to better outcomes overall. And conservatives, as opposed to bleeding-heart liberals, are supposed to understand that there’s more at stake than the outcome in individual cases, and that there are real costs to putting whatever thumb-pressure on the scales it takes to get to a desired outcome in each case. Or so I thought.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bill Oliver emails:

Conservatives do not believe that a law must be obeyed no matter how wrong or evil that law happens to be, nor do they necessarily believe that a court decision must be obeyed no matter how evil that decision. Certainly our founding fathers did not believe so.

I gather that you would have opposed the civil rights movement, since it involved resistance to immoral laws? I gather you would have supported the continuance of slavery?

See, this is what I’m talking about. The fact is that we have a hard case. I think that the courts involved, and there have been a lot of them, have been doing a conscientious job. But don’t trust me, listen to Daniel Henninger in the WSJ today:

It is true that Judge Greer has ruled against Terri Schiavo’s parents, the Schindlers, many times. But by my count, in the five years from the original circuit court decision, the rulings against them include the following:

Florida’s appeals court: eight times; the Florida Supreme Court: five times; U.S. federal courts: five times; the U.S. Supreme Court: three times.

This is a lot of judges. Some of the opinions are long discourses combing back through the details of the case. It is difficult for me to believe that these are all “liberal” judges intent on “killing” Terri Schiavo.

So the question is, do we overturn courts that are conscientiously doing their job because we think they got it wrong this time? Do we trust a bunch of Congressmen who often don’t even read the bills they vote on to do a better job?

If you think that nobody should ever be taken off a feeding tube regardless of their condition, maybe so. But if you think the real question is whether Terry Schiavo is brain-dead or not, then it seems to me that absent some pretty strong reason to think the courts can’t be trusted, it makes sense to let them do the job. And judging by all the discussion of her condition, the second question is the one that’s the big issue.

AUSTIN BAY NOTES SOMETHING INTERESTING. Especially when read together with this.

DAVID HUANG: “I wish I could say that I became a tax attorney because of my love for numbers and clear cut rules, but the truth of the matter is that I became a tax lawyer for the same reason that musicians join bands – for the chicks.”

Take advantage of it while you still can, David . . . .

(Via TaxProf).

JAMES MILLER PREDICTS A COMING WAR ON BLOGS:

It’s a universal law of capitalism: when an industry faces a new and significant threat to its profits and powers it turns to the government for protection. Well, bloggers who write on current events are challenging the mainstream media (MSM), the most politically well-connected industry in America. Watch for the MSM to start using their political influence to burden bloggers.

He has some thoughts on how that might take place.

UPDATE: More worries here. Meanwhile, note this stirring defiance from law professor blogger Tom Smith: “they can stop us from blogging and saying whatever we think, especially about political candidates, when they pry our keyboards from our cold, dead fingers.”

ARMORED HUMVEES: Too dangerous?

Most of the accidents involve new hummers, the ones with armor installed at the factory. The hummer was always considered a safe vehicle, because it had a low center of gravity, and it’s width made is less prone to rollovers. But now there are more rollovers, and they appear to be caused by the increased weight of the armor, and the higher speeds troops use to avoid, or get away from, ambushes. Combat casualties have been falling sharply over the past three months, and part of that has to do with the high speed driving tactics adopted by troops using hummers. Such tactics have evolved over the last two years. But all that hot rodding comes at the cost of more fatal accidents.

As I wrote before, “it’s not as simple as more armor = better.” There are tradeoffs — speed vs. protection is one of the oldest in military design — which the simplistic and uninformed press coverage of the issue missed, as usual.

UPDATE: On the tradeoff, reader Mike Dayton emails: “Not only military design. Which do you see more of – rabbits or armadillos?”

Heh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My combat-engineer secretary emails from Iraq:

As far as the armor on the humvees goes, this argument could also be made for the body armor we wear on our persons. In fact, Anthony Zinni states in Battle Ready that he felt that Vietnam era body armor was not worth the trade off in mobility. I felt the same way about our body armor until I got here. As far as humvee mobility, I think that the trade is worth it as an armored humvee you would “just lead don’t lead ’em as much.” This is of course personal opinion based on zero empirical evidence. In addition to rollover tendencies, a long term issue will be maintenance — the add on armor is simply wearing the
vehicles out.

Just my .02.

In other news got to swim in a pool which use to belong to Saddam on one of the palace compounds at the airport. I think his architectural tastes could best be described as “thug/pimp.” I would imagine that a Houston drug dealer from ’88 would be in heaven.

Makes sense to me.

INTERESTING ARTICLE ON BLOGS AND ADVERTISING, from The Wall Street Journal. (Free link). Shockingly, some advertisers find the content of Nick Denton’s properties “too naughty.”

HOLD THE TULIPS: Capt. Ed warns against getting too excited, too soon, about the future of Kyrgyzstan. He’s right to worry. Remember, democratization is a process, not an event.

UPDATE: More from Dan Darling, here. And Arthur Chrenkoff says we need focused attention on the promotion of democracy in out-of-the-way places, and that we can’t count on Europe:

You can still expect a great deal of pain, some unavoidable ingratitude and many, many setbacks. As I said, it’s not easy – the much under-estimated Post-Totalitarian Stress Disorder will be the greatest enemy – but we have little choice. Doing nothing and hoping for the best is no longer a viable foreign policy option.

Is it time for a “Wolfowitz Plan?”

HOW ARE YOU GONNA KEEP ‘EM DOWN ON THE FARM, after they’ve seen Guangdong?

In interview after interview, they spoke of the huge shift in perspective they experienced upon entering China. “When I lived in Korea, I never thought my leaders were bad,” said one woman in her 50’s, a farmer who had brought her grown daughter to Yanji recently from her home not far from the other side of the border for treatment of an intestinal ailment. “When I got here, I learned that Chinese can travel wherever they want in the world as long as they have the money. I learned that South Korea is far richer, even than China.”

“If we are so poor,” she continued, “it must be because of Kim Jong Il’s mistakes,” she said referring to North Korea’s leader.

I think that more people will be catching on to this.

DARFUR UPDATE: It’s easy to see why the U.N. has been paralyzed:

The answer is that China plays by a different set of rules. As China’s support for the rogue regimes in Iran and Sudan has made clear, moral constraints and human-rights considerations are not pillars of Beijing’s foreign-policy calculus. While Tehran threatens to go nuclear and Khartoum continues its genocide in Darfur, Beijing has used its clout (and U.N. veto) to shield these regimes from international sanctions. In return, it receives entree into two important energy markets. . . .

The fact that China has overpaid for recent ventures in Oman, Sudan and elsewhere is telling. Rather than investing in money-makers, China is buying footholds throughout the Middle East.

These footholds are popping up everywhere. While China’s relations with Saudia Arabia and Iran have received the most press, its dealings in countries such as Oman and Sudan are even more extraordinary. In Sudan, China is the single largest shareholder of an oil company consortium that dominates Sudan’s oil industry and the chief investor in the country’s largest pipeline.

Meanwhile, in a possibly-unrelated development, there’s resistance among many third-world nations to the idea of the United Nations intervening to promote democracy and prevent genocide. Norm Geras notes a parallel, here.

SCHIAVO HYSTERIA from Fox’s John Gibson:

Just to burnish my reputation as a bomb thrower, I think Jeb Bush should give serious thought to storming the Bastille.

By that I mean he should think about telling his cops to go over to Terri Schiavo’s hospice, go inside, put her on a gurney and load her into an ambulance. They could take her to a hospital, revive her, and reattach her feeding tube. It wouldn’t save Terri exactly; she’d still be in the same rotten shape she was in before they disconnected the feeding tube.

I think John Gibson should have to spend a few minutes alone with Bill Quick.

UPDATE: Ron Brownstein, on the other hand, wins the award for the cheesiest effort so far to make hay out of the Schiavo tragedy for his own unrelated pet issue: “Does the ‘culture of life’ extend to the victims of gun violence?”

As John Cole observes: “There is enough dumb out there to hold both parties back.”

TOM MAGUIRE has a roundup on the continuing implosion of the Plame scandal. Oddly, Josh Marshall has nothing on this.