Virginia forges ahead on settling East Asia dispute

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I’m still not sure what or who brought it up in the first place, but, having apparently solved all other pressing policy matters in the state, Virginia’s elected officials have in recent years begun debating whether or not public school textbooks in the state should refer to the body of water between Japan and the Korean Peninsula as the “Sea of Japan” or the “East Sea” or both.

Below is the CIA World Factbook map of the area, which represents the official label of the United States government and military:
japan-map

The South Korean government believes the name “Sea of Japan” is an offensive remnant of Japanese imperialism, including the period in which they brutally occupied the Korean peninsula (thus holding the territory on both sides of the sea). They want people to call it “East Sea” (their northern counterparts say “East Sea of Korea” but no one listens to them), though they are willing to compromise and call it both.

And for some reason, a lot of state officials in Virginia seem quite persuaded that this South Korean view is the right position. This is happening, despite, as far as I can tell, it having nothing to do with anything, from Virginia’s standpoint.

So Virginia would be going against the view of the U.S. government (rather inexplicably) and against the recently renewed directives of the International Hydrographic Organization, the official international body that decides what to name bodies of water — though, to be fair, the latter was originally set when Korea was occupied and could not challenge it.

Not only have their been multiple bills proposed on the issue over the past few years, but after a single-issue pressure group was formed in early 2013, the candidates for governor last year had to address the issue on the campaign trail. Here’s an example of the coverage this got in Korean media:

“The body of water known, alternately, as the East Sea or the Sea of Japan, should be properly labeled with both names,” McAuliffe told reporters after a meeting with the Voice of Korean Americans (VoKA). VoKA was launched in January to promote the use of “the East Sea.”

[…]
McAuliffe’s Republican rival, Ken Cuccinelli, also sent a letter to the VoKA last month.

“I give my full support to the use of the dual name of the East Sea/Sea of Japan in Virginia’s school test books,” said the attorney general of the state. “I understand the concerns of our Korean American community and the importance of this issue.”

 

Yes, that’s right, both candidates took the time to endorse a position (the same one, even!) in this issue, which has no substantive impact on anything in Virginia.

With McAuliffe now in office — though it would not, I guess, have made any difference on this particular issue — the very-non-Korean legislators are forging ahead on their proposed law for using both names in the textbooks. This in turn has brought upset Japanese government lobbyists down from Washington D.C. to Richmond to advocate against the change (without much success so far).

Here’s a legislative update from South Korean-based Arirang TV:

To my mind, Virginia’s obsession with this “issue” defies virtually every “law” of American political science.

It doesn’t affect voters, there’s probably not a lot to be gained from it, and it wouldn’t seem like something either voters or legislators would care about — yet somehow they keep bringing it up in session and on the campaign trail.

Where will it end? Is it just a weirdly minute way to stick it to the United States government and assert Tenth Amendment rights? Interestingly, the naval base in Virginia would, of course, still be using the U.S. military’s labeling, even as schoolchildren learned a different labeling.

In any case, I don’t really have an opinion on this issue one way or the other. I just find the fixation in Virginia a bit intriguing and odd.

North Carolina: Go rich or go anywhere else

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North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory’s campaign to drive out the poor seems to be continuing full speed ahead. In addition to cutting and phasing out the Earned Income Tax Credit, Think Progress observes that,

…low-income North Carolinians will be paying higher taxes in order to pay for a tax cut for the richest people in the state. Republicans moved from a two-tiered, progressive income tax system to a flat tax rate of 5.8 percent. A person who earns a million dollars per year will get a roughly $10,000 tax cut thanks to that move, but the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution will see their taxes rise. That means that four out of five taxpayers in the state were going to pay more next year even before the EITC repeal.

The combined effects of those tax changes give poor North Carolinians some incentive to move out of the state, a population shift Gov. Pat McCrory (R) hopes to encourage.

 
It’s a flat-tax miracle, y’all!

Just last June, the state became the first in the nation to provide zero unemployment benefits. When the Federal government shut down in October, North Carolina immediately suspended WIC vouchers — literally taking food from the mouths of babes — as every other state used emergency/contingency funds.

This is all in line with Gov. McCrory’s views that North Carolina is too generous to low-income and unemployed people and that those undesirables must be just absolutely flocking to the state’s inner cities from the Dickensian hellscape that he apparently believes is the rest of America right now. That view in turn is just the tip of the McCrory/NC Republican iceberg of destruction, which has included trying to vaporize abortion rights and making it very difficult for some people to vote.

His deeply regressive policy agenda, shared by Republican state legislators in the majority there, has been called by The New York Times, “The Decline of North Carolina” and by me “North Carolina: Not Checking Itself, Before Wrecking Itself, Since 2010.”

Oddly, the former seemingly-moderate Charlotte mayor, seems to be extremely (and oddly publicly) thin-skinned for a high-profile politician and has not been taking the criticism well at all, as explored in a prominent column in the Charlotte Observer this past December:

…my interview with him last week and a breakfast with him a couple weeks earlier make clear he hasn’t changed a bit in one respect: This is a man obsessed with his image and how he’s portrayed. It’s clear he doesn’t go a day without being deeply frustrated by what he sees as unfair attacks on his good name.

My hour-and-40-minute one-on-one with the governor began with him complaining about an editorial cartoon and ended with a complaint about how Art Pope, one of his chief advisers, is depicted. In between, McCrory repeatedly sprinkled asides and bromides about how the media are out to get him and his administration. When I sat next to him at a recent breakfast, he tugged on my sleeve every couple of minutes, leaned over and murmured his displeasure with this cartoon or that editorial or a news story from six months ago.

[…]
Most of McCrory’s troubles stem, in his mind, not from his support of policies that a majority of North Carolinians disagree with but from a media that, through bias or incompetency, just can’t understand his greatness.

 

Huzzah. That’s leadership you can depend on.

Egypt’s Sisi selflessly offers to be leader forever

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fake-time-magazine-egypt-200In the least convincing denial yet that he is building a cult of personality and permanent personal dictatorship, Egypt’s General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi has told voters there that they should vote for his new constitution in this week’s referendum if they want him to run for president:

“If I run, then it must be at the request of the people and with a mandate from my army,” General Sisi said at a military seminar, according to the website of the state newspaper, Al Ahram. “I can’t turn my back on Egypt.”

 

Sisi added that it would be embarrassing for him if they didn’t vote for it, and you don’t want to disappoint the Dear Father.

“Don’t embarrass me in front of the world,” he said, “not me personally but the military, because in the military we are as united as one man’s heart, and we adhere to democracy.” He noted that the new charter authorizes the military to “protect the will of the people” and he vowed, “We will protect it in any circumstances.”

 

Fortunately for Sisi, campaigning against the proposed constitution is not allowed. Seems like a pretty fair way to check on public opinion before you run for something, right? And just to be sure, the state propaganda engines are grinding away toward victory:

The state news media and Egyptian private television networks, all supportive of the military takeover, are effusive in their endorsements of the new charter and contain scarcely a word of criticism. A group of Egyptian movie stars has recorded a television commercial singing a song in praise of the new charter, ending with a call for a thousand yeses to the new Constitution. And the military itself has produced a television advertisement in which a group of children sing their own endorsement to a martial theme.

“It’s to be or not to be,” the children sing, warning listeners that they will be judged by God for their vote and urging them not to “leave my country for destruction.”

 

So, to recap: If you vote against this, you’ll embarrass the national armed forces and its leader and then God will smite you. This seems compelling.

Feds have questions about NJ tourism ads

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More trouble for Christie in New Jersey. CNN via Daily Kos:

In the new probe, federal auditors will examine New Jersey’s use of $25 million in Sandy relief funds for a marketing campaign to promote tourism at the Jersey Shore after Sandy decimated the state’s coastline in late 2012, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone told CNN. […]

Pallone wrote that he was concerned about the bidding process for the firm awarded the marketing plan; the winning firm is charging the state about $2 million more than the next lowest bidder. The winning $4.7 million bid featured Christie and his family in the advertisements while the losing $2.5 million proposal did not feature the Christies.

 
I saw those ads a lot while I was in Delaware (unsurprisingly) but it never occurred to me that they were funded with Federal relief aid, let alone through a sketchy contract awards process. This is the kind of waste that makes Gulf Coast and inland Republicans suddenly look righteous instead of monstrous for trying to block Federal disaster relief to New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy. (They’re still monsters, of course. They just look less so.)

Anyway, with these scandals coming out into the open, it’s increasingly clear to the public why Romney passed on Christie as a running mate between the final two picks. In the words of Double Down, “The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record.”

Giuliani recalls scandal that never happened

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Rudy Giuliani (who is still a thing?) was on TV today trying to compare Chris Christie’s bridge scandal to “the IRS scandal.” You may remember this as the firestorm whipped up by the House Republicans on one of their many Oversight Committee witch-hunts, led by Darrel Issa, which asserted that the IRS was targeting conservative political groups unfairly for heightened scrutiny. Giuliani feels that Christie could have not known about the bridge closures by his senior aides, like how President Obama didn’t know what the IRS was up to.

Did someone forget to tell Rudy that it turned out that the supposed IRS “scandal” was made up? Like, not even partially a thing that ever actually happened? Because, you know, the rest of us got that point cleared up quite a while back, last June. As I wrote then:

The so-called IRS scandal just fell apart completely as documents surfaced showing they were also scrutinizing applications for left/liberal/progressive code words, not just tea party code words. In other words, they were doing their jobs, not being partisan.

So why did it take so long for IRS documents showing targeting of progressives to show up after those showing tea party targeting? Oh, no reason, except that House Republicans specifically asked the IRS to audit ONLY its records on tea party groups. So NBD, they just 100% manufactured a fake scandal from thin air.

 
The IRS doing its job, and applying that equally to both conservative and liberal scofflaws, is not a scandal. The Port Authority closing part of a major bridge to punish a political opponent of the Governor of New Jersey is.