Here are some new web items related to work I’ve been doing:
1. My latest media column for the Rocky Mountain News examines local coverage of last week’s developments in the Ward Churchill case. The column also reports on media bashing of Colorado Springs and its elected officials and congressional candidates because of their un-p.c. stands on some social issues.
2. The Independence Institute
recently hosted a speech by Jack Chen, Director General of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the midwestern U.S. (That is, head of the midwestern consular office for Taiwan). You can listen to the MP3 file of the speech, and my introduction, here. As I point out in the introduction, the notion that China has a historic claim of sovreignty over Taiwan is incorrect. Taiwan and China were nominally part of the same nation in 1945-49 (although the Nationalist government of the time did not even have effective soveignty over much of the mainland during this period) and for 17 years in the 19th century. Before that, China had claimed sovereignty only over part of Taiwan, and emphatically disclaimed sovereignty over the rest.
3. There’s now a Polish translation of the 4-page summary of my monograph “Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11.” The Polish translation joins previous translations in Czech, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Swedish. Although the English-language blogosphere and media have long made it clear, to anyone who cares to pay attention, how false Fahrenheit 9/11 really was, and although the conventional political wisdom is that Fahrenheit 9/11 provoked a backlash which helped Bush win re-election (and also destroyed the hopes of a Democratic U.S. House candidate Ginny Schraeder, who had used a Fahrenheit screening as a fundraiser in her southeast Pennsylvania district), it is still true that Fahrenheit 9/11, and its maliciously anti-American propaganda, are still influential in the non-English speaking world.
4. In a project organized by some staffers of the Italian magazine Il Foglio, hundreds of legislators and policy analysts in Europe and the United States signed a call for strong Western action against Iran’s terrorist regime. You can read an English-language summary here. The English-language report somewhat garbles my identification (which is Research Director at the Independence Institute), presumably because of difficulties in Italian-English translation.