A well developed sense of humor is a characteristic feature of Virginians, but not of government officials, even in Virginia. The Virginia DMV has banned my favorite vanity license plate. I’ve actually seen this plate driving by on local roads.

Matt Hardigree has the unhappy details.

H/t to Karen L. Myers.

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Mochi (a chewy rice cake served during Japanese New Year celebrations) kills more people than Fugu (sushi made from a blowfish containing tetrodotoxin). The Telegraph explains why.

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An apple tree consumed the remains of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams. Greg Ross has details.

Via Ka Ching.

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Daniel Mitchell predicts how Barney Frank and Henry Waxman will react when the Constitution is read aloud.

Robert J. Samuelson warns that the United States has a very good chance of duplicating the Japanese experience. Like Japan, the US has an aging population and consequently a shrinking domestic market, problems producing affordable exports, and a tax and regulatory regime not encouraging to new start-ups.

It’s hard to remember now that in the 1980s Japan had the world’s most-admired economy. It would, people widely believed, achieve the highest living standards and pioneer the niftiest technologies. Nowadays, all we hear are warnings not to repeat Japan’s mistakes that resulted in a “lost decade” of economic growth. Japan’s cardinal sins, we’re told, were skimping on economic “stimulus” and permitting paralyzing “deflation” (falling prices). People postponed buying because they expected prices to go lower. That’s the conventional wisdom – and it’s wrong.

Just the opposite is true: Japan’s economic eclipse shows the limited power of economic stimulus and the exaggerated threat of modest deflation. There is no substitute for vigorous private-sector job creation and investment, and that’s been missing in Japan. This is a lesson we should heed.

Japan’s economic problems, like ours, originated in huge asset “bubbles.” From 1985 to 1989, Japan’s stock market tripled. Land prices in major cities tripled by 1991. The crash was brutal. By year-end 1992, stocks had dropped 57 percent from 1989. Land prices fell in 1992 and proceeded steadily downward; they are now at early 1980s’ levels. Wealth shrank. Banks – having lent on the collateral of inflated land values – weakened. Some became insolvent. The economy sputtered. It grew about 1.5 percent annually in the 1990s, down from 4.4 percent in the 1980s.

Despite massive stimulus, rapid growth hasn’t resumed two decades later.

Claude, a then six-year-old Asiatic Black Bear (Ursus thibetanus) demonstrates his mastery of the katas of the Bo at the Asa Zoological Park in Hiroshima, Japan in 2008.

3:21 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Japanese intellectual worker’s survival rations: canned coffee and a couple of packs of cigarettes. The pezzonovantes would never let anyone package such hazardous products together in this way in the “mostly free” US of A.

Hat tip to the News Junkie, Ambisinistral and Trendhunter

Japanese sink $1.5 million Sea Shepherd boat engaged in harassing a Japanese whaling ship in Antarctic waters. That’s really too bad.

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Ta- Nehisi Coates, in A Bad Time For the Empire, is philosophical about impending democrat party congressional losses resulting from ramming socialism down America’s throat.

If you work for the DNC or RNC, or if you cover politics for the media, elections are the end. The conversation of policy isn’t even really about policy, so much as it’s about how policy will effect the next election. But for others of us, policy is the end. Winning elections is nice, but you don’t elect candidates so that they can stand in front the capitol and look pretty, anymore than you send soldiers to the field for a photo-op. They’re there to do a job. And sometimes the job costs.

At least he identifies just which side he’s on. The Health Care Bill’s resemblance to other famous legislation has been remarked upon before.

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New Codes from Obama’s TSA:

From Vanderleun.

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Obama promises open Health Care Bill negotiations televised on C-Span 8 times.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs declined to discuss the president’s promises.

There was a time when American leaders did not bow to foreign princes.

Wesley Pruden delivers some well-deserved criticism of Barack Obama’s mistakes in presidential protocol.

So far it’s a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents). Several Internet sites published a rogue’s gallery showing how other national leaders – the prime ministers of Israel, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia and Dick Cheney among them – have greeted Emperor Akihito with a friendly handshake and an ever-so-slight but respectful nod (and sometimes not even that).

Now we know why Mr. Obama stunned everyone with an earlier similar bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, only the bow to the Japanese emperor was far more flamboyant, a sign of a really deep sense of inferiority. He was only practicing his bow in Riyadh. Sometimes rituals are learned with difficulty. It took Bill Clinton months to learn how to return a military salute worthy of a commander in chief; like any draft dodger, he kept poking a thumb in his eye until he finally got it. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, seems right at home now giving a wow of a bow. …

Some of the president’s critics are giving him a hard time, and it’s true that this president seems never to have studied much American history. Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about. His predecessors learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye. Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog, with ballpark mustard, to the king and queen of England? John F. Kennedy, on the eve of a trip to London, sharply warned Jackie not to curtsy to the queen.

Douglas MacArthur, who ranked above mere heads of state in his own mind, once invented his own protocol on greeting Emperor Hirohito. The emperor, the father of Akihito, wanted to meet MacArthur soon after he arrived to become the military regent of Japan in 1945, perhaps to thank him for saving the throne at the end of World War II. When the emperor invited MacArthur to call on him, the general sent word that the emperor should call on him – speaking of breaches of custom – and the two men were photographed together, astonishing the Japanese. The emperor arrived in full formal dress, cutaway coat and all, and MacArthur received him in summer khakis, sans tie, with his hands stuffed casually in his back pockets. Further astonishing the Japanese, he towered over the diminutive emperor.

Read the whole thing.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t bow

HotAirPundit demonstrates that he-men heads of state don’t bow to Akihito.

OTOH, Kathy Kattenburg thinks caring about these kinds of issues (Republic vs. Monarchy, Government by Consent vs. Divine Right) makes you a “yokel.” For her, politically correct guilt over Harry Truman dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki trumps these formal considerations. We bombed Akihito’s country and defeated it. Obviously, the poor soul cries himself to sleep every night over what my father’s generation did to his countrymen. The least Obama can do is grovel to him in compensation.

The Politico channels the explanation:

A senior administration official said President Barack Obama was simply observing protocol when he bowed to Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko upon arriving at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo on Saturday.

“I think that those who try to politicize those things are just way, way, way off base,” the official said. “He observes protocol. But I don’t think anybody who was in Japan – who saw his speech and the reaction to it, certainly those who witnesses his bilateral meetings there – would say anything other than that he enhanced both the position and the status of the U.S., relative to Japan. It was a good, positive visit at an important time, because there’s a lot going on in Japan.”

Gilbert and Sullivan put it better:

If you want to know who we are,
We are gentlemen of Japan:
On many a vase and jar–
On many a screen and fan,
We figure in lively paint:
Our attitude’s queer and quaint–
You’re wrong if you think it ain’t, oh!

If you think we are worked by strings,
Like a Japanese marionette,
You don’t understand these things:
It is simply Court etiquette.

The President of the United States bows before the Emperor of Japan

The LA Times reports that the Chosen One bent low again, this time to Akihito, 125th Emperor of Japan.

Obama’s bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia last April produced widespread criticism as a violation of American Republican principle and protocol. Many Americans believe it is profoundly inappropriate for the President of the United States to render honors acknowledging the superiority of any monarch since the American Republic by its Declaration of Independence rejected monarchy and the claim of unelected rulers to reign on the basis of divine authority.

Oddly enough, Obama reserves, it seems, his gestures of supreme respect for Worthy Oriental Gentlemens. He merely nodded to Queen Elizabeth. In the case of Queen Elizabeth, Michelle Obama made gestures in quite the opposite direction, hugging the Queen and later even patting her affectionately on the back.

Last April’s obeisance to the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”

Paul Begala, at Huffington Post, thinks he’s very clever in quoting the not-clever-at-all John McCain who is also completely wrong.

In a CNN debate with Ari Fleischer, I said the United States executed Japanese war criminals for waterboarding. My point was that it is disingenuous for Bush Republicans to argue that waterboarding is not torture and thus illegal. It’s kind of awkward to argue that waterboarding is not a crime when you hanged someone for doing it to our troops. My precise words were: “Our country executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs. We executed them for the same crime we are now committing ourselves.” …

I was referencing the statement of a different member of the Senate: John McCain. On November 29, 2007, Sen. McCain, while campaigning in St. Petersburg, Florida, said, “Following World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding.”

Sen. McCain was right and the National Review Online is wrong. Politifact, the St. Petersburg Times’ truth-testing project (which this week was awarded a Pulitzer Prize), scrutinized Sen. McCain’s statement and found it to be true. Here’s the money quote from Politifact:

“McCain is referencing the Tokyo Trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as ‘water cure,’ ‘water torture’ and ‘waterboarding,’ according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning.” Politifact went on to report, “A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps.”

Actually, murders, massacres, and death marches head the International Military Tribunal for the Far East’s list of war crimes, and the use of water simply happens to the first item addressed in a subsequent heading titled “Torture and Other Inhumane Treatment.” Since burning, flogging, strappado, and pulling out finger and toe nails are mentioned after the “water cure,” it is far from obvious that the authors of the Tribunal’s list of war crimes were intending to rank it as more inhumane than the others.

Politifact’s anonymous authorities (drawn from presumably the staffs of the St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly which created Politifact as a joint venture) are betraying their own liberal journalist prejudices and manipulating the available data to suit their own preferences.

They, and Paul Begala and John McCain, are most particularly and obviously in error in equating the Japanese “water cure” torture with US water-boarding.

In the “water cure,” according to the Tribunal’s war crimes description, [t]he victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach until he lost consciousness. Pressure was then applied, sometimes by jumping upon his abdomen to force the water out. The usual practice was to revive the victim and successively repeat the process.

The Tribunal does not mention it, but historically the “water cure” torture technique was often performed with sufficient brutality that internal organs would be ruptured with fatal results, or merely performed excessively to the point where the victim’s body’s electrolyte balance was fatally compromised, producing death by “water intoxication.”

In the “water-cure,” the victim’s mouth is forced open, and enormous quantities of water are poured down his throat. If he fails to swallow any of the rapidly-poured water, it goes into his lungs and he really does experience drowning.

In the US-government-authorized water-boarding of three mass murderers, a cloth or cellophane barrier was placed over the criminal’s face and water poured on it for intervals of 10 to 40 seconds. Water was specifically prevented from entering the subject’s respiratory system.

Elaborate and carefully calculated protocols had been laid down, in precisely the opposite manner of the Japanese case, 1) confining the use of such comparatively harsh interrogation techniques to a tiny number of extremely guilty terrorists likely to possess extremely vital information on major threats to the lives of many thousands of innocent American civilians, and 2) assuring that no real lasting physical or mental harm was ever actually inflicted on the three major terrorist prisoners.

Those are extremely significant differences, Mr. Begala.

Beyond that, Begala, Politifact, and even Senator McCain overlook another very important consideration: the laws and customs of war.

We punished the defeated Japanese after WWII, and US troops commonly punished Japanese encountered in the field by offering no quarter, for Japanese disregard of the civilized European world’s military customs of avoiding the practice of perfidy (i.e. not falsely surrendering and then opening fire, not wearing the wrong uniform, and so on) and according prisoners of war honorable status and treating them humanely.

We do not owe Al Qaeda terrorists prisoner of war status. We do not, in fact, owe them, by the conventional laws and customs of war, anything beyond summary execution following drumhead courts martial at the pleasure of the officer in immediate authority. United States military forces, in fact, would by traditional standards not only possess every right to extract forcibly by any measures necessary any and all information necessary to preserve innocent life, they would have a grave obligation to do so.

It is the Al Qaeda terrorists who, like the Japanese in WWII, reject the civilized world’s customs of limiting behavior in war. And, as we punished the Japanese during and after WWII for failing to adopt our customs, we ought to be punishing Al Qaeda terrorists the same way for the same reasons. That is how the laws and customs of war are enforced.

Terrorist prisoners, in their capacity as hostis humani generis, by the conventional laws and customs of war for thousands of years, are entitled to nothing whatsoever in the form of rights, judicial proceeding, or sympathy. They deserve absolutely nothing other than execution by some harsh method particularly expressive of contumely like hanging.

Described as somewhere in China, it’s really a neglected suspension bridge, constructed in the 1950s (and not recently repaired) located in the Akaiski Mountains of Southern Japan. It’s called Musou Tsuribashi.

6:31 video

One wonders if the videographer came back the same way.

Held at the Yasukuni Shrine during New Year’s holiday.

8:00 video

Hat tip to Paul Martin.