And the gaijin cause takes 2 steps back.

This is the really frustrating thing. Whenever it seems as if gaijin are making headway toward being equal citizens in Japan, someone does something stupid and ruins it for the rest of us. This time, our story takes place in the hallowed halls of Sumo. For the last several years, there has been a massive influx of gaijin sumo wrestlers rising to prominence in the most Japanese of sports. For example, both of the reigning Yokozuna (grand champions) Asashoryu and Hakuho are from Mongolia. And it is not uncommon to see the odd Caucasian in the middle ranks at a major tournament. A few days ago, this all came to a screeching halt.

Two of the most prominent gaijin wrestlers, a pair of brothers from Russia, tested positive for marijuana in the sports first ever round of drug tests on Monday. The reason for these tests was the drug related arrest of another gaijin wrestler a few months ago. He was caught with 2.5oz of pot in his wallet. He will inevitably go to jail and/or be deported and his sumo career is over.

It is worth noting that possession of marijuana is a VERY serious offense in Japan. Possession of a single ounce is worth no less than 3 years in jail (no more than 5) hard labor and a $10,000 fine. It is unknown at this time if criminal charges will be pressed against the brothers who only tested positive for the drug. Possession, distribution, trafficking and being caught while using MJ are crimes. Having used it sometime in the past is not.

However, sumo wrestlers are held to a high moral standard due to the religious origins of their sport. As such, both the brothers have received lifetime bans from the Japan Sumo Association (JSA) and the JSA chairman has resigned in disgrace. This scandal has been front page news across the nation trumping the resignation of Prime Minister Fukuda. And you thought Americans took their games seriously.

At the risk of sounding like John McCain, I say blame the Russians.

Palin is a horrible person

OK, this is the ranting I promised regarding the pros and cons of Sarah Palin as the VP nominee of the GOP. I’ll start with the pros and go from there because the higher quality and more impassioned writing comes with the cons and I want to make you wait for that. Before I begin, I want everyone to remember that this woman is running to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency and the President in question would be a 72 year old man with cancer.

When you consider that the US life expectancy for a man is 75.15 years according to the 2007 world fact book. In other words, statistically speaking and when you consider the stress of the job, John McCain will be dead before his 3rd State of the Union Address. On that less than happy note, let’s do this:

PROS:
1. Palin is literally a continent away from the Bush Administration. The GOP know that President Bush is a complete failure and that McCain is far too buddy-buddy with him. But no one in Washington (including John McCain) knows who she is. She can come out of the blue and be a clean slate.
2. The GOP can control the story, kinda. The idea seems to be that the 24 hour news cycle of the 1990s hasn’t reached Alaska yet so Palin doesn’t have any press record. Therefore the GOP can mold her into anything they choose. This is turning out to be total rubbish but what are you going to do?
3. Energize the base. This woman is such a hardcore conservative that she borders on fascist. Prolife, pro death penalty (I’ve never understood how those aren’t mutually exclusive), pro gun、pro war, anti immigration, pro church, anti everything Jesus actually said. In other words, the GOP’s wet dream.
4. Power to the PUMA! I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but Sarah Palin has breasts! Now, since all of Hilary Clinton’s supporters are women, Sarah Palin will use her connections in the International Sisterhood of the Va**** to get all of the PUMAs to vote for John McCain despite the fact that she everything she stands for are exactly the opposite of everything that Clinton stands for.

OK, yeah, most of those are stupid and backhanded compliments. But I can’t come up with much that is legitimately good with this choice. As for the cons, there are so many that a true list would constitute a book and there is no way I could scare up a publisher or distribution deal in time so I’ll only list the two most egregious.

CONS:
1. Child abuse. The way this woman uses her family as political fodder is disgusting. First, she uses her son Track (Barack is a weird/evil/foreign name but Track is OK?) as a symbol of how much she “Supports the Troops”©. Then she shows her many children as proof that she shares stereotypical small town values (will SOMEONE explain what the hell “small town values” are?). And worst of all, she shows off pregnant 17 year old daughter and her infant son as proof that she lives her prolife stance.

Let me get this last one straight. Her daughter made a mistake. The mistake in question being that she forgot that there are about 90 different kinds of birth control. Now she has to have the baby with the world watching. Her life is changed irrevocably because her mother is running for vice president. I’m not saying that she should have an abortion, that’s her CHOICE. But of all the reasons to have a child “It helps Mom’s poll numbers” is damn close to the bottom.

It gets worse with the baby. Young Trig Palin has Down Syndrome. His existence is being used by the Fixed Noise as prove that Gov. Palin is truly pro life. In other words, the message is: She didn’t get an abortion even though she knew the baby would come out wrong what a wonderful woman!

2. Book burning. This last one has to speak for itself. During her political career Sarah Palin looked into having a large number of books banned from public and school libraries. Fortunately, the local librarians realized that you simply can’t do that in America and swore to fight any such attempt. Palin then had the librarian fired at the earliest opportunity. This list has been floating around the internet. Please note that this list may not be complete or accurate.

This is the list of books Palin tried to have banned.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth

Good night and good luck.

A surprising twist in Japanese politics

At least our losers have some sense. Hi everyone, and by everyone I mean the two family members and occasional spam-bot who read this. I’m back from a long overdue holiday in the US. I’ll write up a report of the things I found interesting returning to the US of A at a later time. Today I want to talk about Former PM Fukuda.

That’s right, the Japanese Prime Minister resigned this morning. Claiming that he felt he could no longer deal with the multitude of issues facing Japan at the moment and that it was time for someone new to take the reigns. And there have been some serious issues: Record gas prices, the end of the longest post-war economic expansion ever, a fruitless G8 summit, and a new healthcare plan that shifted a lot of burden away from the government and the tax payers and on to the elderly. Considering that Japan has the greyest and longest lived population in the world, this was not a bright move.

In addition, Fukuda had to deal with the first divided parliament in Japanese history. One house is controlled by each party but Fukuda’s LDP (Liberal Democratic Party aka The Conservatives) still maintains the overall majority.

As of last week, his approval rating was down to 29% despite a recent reshuffling of the cabinet, normally a guaranteed numbers boost. So, after less than a year in office, the 72 year old Fukuda chose to quit before he dragged the nation too far into the dirt. Isn’t that a nice idea?

Although the ruling party is able to call for elections whenever they choose, they are not REQUIRED to hold a general election until September 2009. Knowing that they are at a low point approval wise, the LDP has decided not to hold an election and instead the party leaders will privately select the new PM. This may happen as soon as the end of the week since Parliament is due to open a new session on Sept. 12th.

Naturally the opposition party is up in arms about the private selection concept and is clamoring for elections to be held. The claim is that the LDP is not willing to hear the voice of the people. Now, none of this is going to do a blessed thing, but it’s a nice point to mention.

The likely replacement for Fukuda is Aso Taro. I don’t know much about him accept that he is a former Foreign Minister and known to be significantly more conservative than Fukuda. I don’t envy the guy. With mandatory election a year away, his party can’t afford 3 failed prime ministers in a row.

I know that most people are bored by Japanese politics. So to balance the scales, my next entry will be an analysis of Sen. McCain’s VP choice including *gasp* some positives.