Fair and balanced, that's me
Having just been mean to the Washington Post, I want to agree wholeheartedly with their take on the Falun Gong reporter who yelled at Hu Jintao. The editorial (Overreacting to Protest) asks, "does Ms. Wang deserve to go to prison for six months?" and answers:

That might be the response to embarrassing and rude speech in Beijing. It shouldn't be in Washington. But yesterday the U.S. government charged Ms. Wang under a law that could bring her that sentence. [...]

...the United States shouldn't indirectly apologize to the Chinese by means of an action that affronts American values.

Remember, Bush said in his 2005 inaugural speech:

All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

As long as you're not standing on the White House lawn. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:37:00 AM -- |    

 
Department of obvious points
Part of being out of the loop in Italy was missing the quickening pace of generals voicing criticism of Donald Rumsfeld: Zinni, Newbold, Eaton, to name a few. Gary Farber points out that the ensuing defense of Rumsfeld by current and former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) like General Pace or General Myers doesn't mean much as far as Iraq operations go:

So when Meyers or any of the JCS then, or now, say they have no problems with how Rumsfeld handled Iraq, well, this doesn't mean remotely as much as it would mean if they had much of anything to do with Iraq.

It certainly doesn't mean as much as the opinion of someone actually in the [operational] chain of command, such as those whom have spoken up.

That's a good obvious point. Here's another one: the fact that all the critical generals concerned were retired generals negates any real concerns about undermining civilian control of the armed forces because they're, well, civilians.

This isn't just some cute debating point. The concern (at least as I see it) with active duty military weighing in on civilian defense and war policymaking is that they can actively undermine civilian decisions, or potential decisions, that they dislike. No such problem exists for retired generals: no one has to obey their orders.

Some writers have tried to preserve their indignation by pointing to retired generals citing anonymous active duty generals who share their views. So vague, second hand, anonymous opinions by an unknown number of officers endanger our constitutional system? Get a grip. As long as it doesn't rise to the level of, say, a Colin Powell actively opposing his commander in chief's legitimate political views on gays in the military, we're fine.

Once clever folks ranging from Kevin Drum to the Washington Post editorial board have fully grokked the distinction between retired and active military personnel holding forth on political issues of the day, they'll find they ought to redirect their ire. Given that Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace went out of his way to put his thumb on the scales of a civilian debate -- Dana Milbank described him as "moonlighting yesterday as Rumsfeld's PR guy" -- Pace has earned exactly the "civilian control" criticism that could not possibly apply to Newbold, Zinni et al. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:09:00 AM -- |    

 
I'm The Decider

I am me and Rummy's he, Iraq is free and we are all together
See the world run when Dick shoots his gun, see how I lie
I'm Lying...

There's more, with sound. Via eRobin. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:40:00 AM -- |    

 
Italy travelogue
What a trip! True, we'll be paying for it for a while, but: what a trip. As I did with our Germany trip a couple of years ago, I'll be adding back-dated posts (posts dated to the time of the trip, rather than the actual date of the post) over the next weeks, along with some of the pictures we took along the way. The outline will be

• Rome
• Rome, continued
• Florence
  
• Baratti and the Tuscan countryside
  
• Siena, and arrivederci
• Miscellaneous notes
  

The posts will be a bit of a memory aid for me, as well as a chance for me to learn more about what I saw. If you prefer, here's a link to some of the better pictures from this trip individually or as a slideshow: more pictures, fewer words.

Right now there are only three photos there of the twenty or so I have available. On the other hand, at that rate I'm liable to post another 20 or 25 photos on my Flickr.com site. However, I'm not a paying Flickr member, so I'll be adding pictures slowly, as my monthly upload limit allows. Subscribing to this feed (RSS) or this one (Atom) provides an easy way to check for new ones. By the way, you can also subscribe to a "Feedblitz" e-mail notification of new "newsrack" posts here; that might make it a bit easier to know when backdated posts have been posted. It's easy to unsubscribe.

I'm trying to catch up on the news as well, but I've been a bit out of the loop for a while; meanwhile, this blog might serve as an occasional welcome Italian vacation from the news. I'll say that I was expecting to still be reading about Libby's revelation about Bush authorizing leaks. But the growing Iran drumbeat and the immigration demonstrations were going to push that out of the limelight a little -- the prospect of yet more war and the concerns of millions of immigrants trump Beltway skulduggery.




=====
UPDATE, 4/26: A couple of posts are up now, click on the "Rome" and "Rome, continued" links or scroll down if you're on the home page. Also, Feedblitz doesn't register backdated posts as new, so that won't work.
UPDATE, 5/5: There are about 30 Italy photos on my Flickr.com site now; many are displayed below, some aren't. Have a look!
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Italy trip: miscellaneous travel notes
This is a catch-all post with various notes about what worked and what didn't in Italy.


Thumbs up

• For last-minute passport needs in the Rosslyn area of Arlington, Virginia, I recommend PVS International Visa Service, they took good care of my application.


• The very kind Air Canada gate person at Toronto who rearranged seats for us so I could sit next to Maddie. This was unfortunately pretty much our only positive experience in Toronto (see below), but it was a good one to have.


• Trenitalia 2d class train travel in Italy was very comfortable and a bargain, and puts you in the middle of town when you've arrived, at least in Rome and Florence. If you're traveling the main cities of Italy, this seems like the way to go.


• DK Eyewitness Travel: Florence & Tuscany: invaluable, with those Dorling Kindersley grade drawings and photographs that really help understand where you're at and what you're seeing. It's well organized, informative, useful, and fun to read both during the trip and now that I've been reliving it at home.


• Pensione Panda and Pensione Paradise in Rome, Hotel Bellettini in Florence. The rooms were clean, comfortable, and quiet, and everyone was very nice and helpful to us.
  
  
• Ristorante Fiammetta in Rome, Trattoria Sostanza in Florence.
  

Thumbs down
Certainly nothing that "ruined" our trip, and not generally thumbs way down. Just thumbs down.

• Canada, Toronto Airport and/or Air Canada operations are generally a mess I intend to avoid in the future when traveling abroad. Things are nice enough once you're on the planes, no complaints there. It's much of what went on before and afterwards that hovered right around the "infuriating" level.
  
  First, you have to go through customs in Canada. Maybe I'm just not remembering having to do this in the past when transiting other countries to a European destination or back, in which case Canada merely stands out for its remarkably insufferable minor customs officials (both directions, in my experience). The one on the return trip seemed to suspect I was kidnapping my own daughter because her mom wasn't along. To top it off, we had to claim our checked luggage and recheck them onto the "connecting" flight back to the U.S. (In fairness, this may be some stupid 9/11-related thing my own great country has insisted on.) At any rate, I soon found myself wishing I was unloading the baggage from the plane as well -- I couldn't have been any slower than the Toronto folks were.
  
  It all seemed like U.S. tourists transiting Canada to Europe and back were a somewhat unwelcome surprise to everyone north of the border - terminal transit buses without drivers, seemingly endless Long Marches through empty terminal architecture, water fountains not working once my jet-lagged little girl had finally schlepped her poor seven year old self to our gate. I half expected to find bleached cattle skulls and the scattered skeletal remains of previous unfortunates by the time we got there. Not "aboot" to happen again with us.
  
  On the other hand, I hear they've got a great health care system up there.


• Italian car rental agencies, including branches of outfits like Avis and Hertz, were unable to give us correct information in Rome about the availability of cars in Florence. The one we eventually used, AutoEurope, was OK, but it would be a good idea to provide a detailed map to help locate the airport dropoff location in advance.

Various and sundry

• Electronic funds can be used in Italy, but are not always as easily accessible as in the U.S. ATM machines that accept Star/Plus type ATM cards are rare in Italy, at least compared to France. I also guess I failed the intelligence test of using my credit card for diesel; the machine read it, but then started asking about kilometers and some kind of additional information (in English, but very cryptic English); it wasn't the PIN because I'd already given that. I had no idea what to type in and wound up using my last 10 euro note instead -- good for about 2 cups of diesel, I'm guessing.
  
  
• It's probably in the travel guide somewhere, but it gradually dawned on us that you often pay more for the same food or drink if you sit down with it at a table than if you walk off with it. While that makes a certain hard-nosed sense -- sometimes we footsore tourists really are mainly after that chair, and plan to sit a spell -- it's not always clear.
  

[Italy travelogue: home] [posted on 5/4] posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:00:00 PM -- |