Quote of the Day

"We Chinese people love the Olympics and support the Olympics, and that's why there are no protesters,"

… and the white wash continues.

If it weren’t for turning on the TV early this morning looking for USA vs. Germany in hoops and accidentally running across a small news item on NBC’s crappy local affiliate which reported on a group of Christians refusing to leave Beijing’s airport until their confiscated Bibles were returned, we would never have heard about it.

Good to know the Chinese “take care of” Bibles the way they take care of dissidents. Story here.


The Chinese promise of setting up “protest pens” for peaceful Chicomm-sanctioned demonstrations was made just to get everyone off their back as there have been, to date, zero demonstrations in the 3 designated venues… one of which is in an amusement park where there is a $10 fee just to get in.

In fact, the Chinese police state can be commended for streamlining their processes to the degree that they don’t waste energy by going out and finding the malcontents, they simply just wait until the malcontents come down to the Olympic security offices to apply for a protest and arrest them there.

Nicholas Krisof of the New York Times decided to take a spin on the protest merry-go-round. His dizzying account of stonewalling, excessive red tape, mountains of conditions and forms all smothered in a thick layer of mind-numbing bureaucracy can be found here.

Amazingly, though, at the end of the article Kristof gets all fair’n’balanced, essentially shrugging his shoulders and implying, “hey, could be worse”… the totality of his little experiment is kind of brushed-off as nothing more than a trip to the DMV. Kristoff: “China is changing: it is no democracy, but it’s also no longer a totalitarian state.”

We don’t want to get into the parsing of political terminology but when we think of a planned, centralized economy, the state being that which "guarantees security and prosperity" (quote from the Opening Ceremonies), young children ripped from their families and taken to Olympic factories where they only see their parents once a year, people being arrested for merely attempting to file paperwork for a protest and a completely empty protest zone, we will just paraphrase a quote used during the primaries,

“China is (still) totalitarian, enough.”