First things first: there are no suicide bombers in Tibet. But unless the Chinese government makes some drastic changes to policies with Tibet, there will be, potentially very, very soon.

At the risk of being a finger-wagger, I can't help but be somewhat appalled at the lack of commentary on the violent protests that have taken place in the Tibet Autonomous Region and surrounding provinces this past week. When the election cycle takes 3 years, we should make a concerted effort to  start thinking about some of the things the next president is actually going to have to deal with. Like a violent guerrilla movement against one of our more problematic and violence-prone allies.

It is, I believe, the general consensus that candidate diaries have degraded  the level of conversation on dKos of late. It's reached that rather pathetic point where we now have daily recommended diaries about how lousy and counterproductive the conversation has become (STFU, TeacherKen, just from recent memory).

What, friends, can be done? Do we just sit around and wait it out? Accept that the right side of dKos has become a place of mediocre candidate cheerleading, dem-on-dem smearing, and general bad vibes. It's a depressing idea, right? These days, when I click on my dKos bookmark, I feel like a junkie whose dealer started getting lousy product-- I keep coming back, but I hate myself for it more and more.

But this morning I got an e-mail, and it gave me an idea. Check it out.

Of all the GOP disasters in the past week, there is one that has thus far gotten little attention on dKos (unless I missed it, in which case it needs more attention anyhow) and would seem to me to encapsulate everything wrong with the Bush administration and his rubberstamp cronies.

That story is the firing of Stuart Bowen Jr, a Republican lawyer who had previously worked under Bush Sr and who was sent to Iraq to head the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. It was his job to track government waste and corruption, and he was by all accounts good at his job. He sent bribe-taking American officials to jail, exposed shoddy work by Halliburton and other contractors, and took the Army to task for not tracking their expenditures. So, naturally, Bush fired him. More on the flip.

Sometimes dKos can be so very disappointing.

Here's some basic facts that some people seem to be having trouble dealing with regarding this morning's news of a thwarted terrorist attack. If you wrote a diary or comment this morning about how bullshit these latest threats are, please print this out and tape it to your monitor.

So, as everyone knows, Kim Jong-il launched some missiles yesterday, prompting several emergency meetings of the UN Security Council, the apparently most relevant members being China, Russia, Japan, and the US. Japan is calling for economic sanctions, China and Russia are disagreeing, though John Bolton claims there is broad support for the proposal, whatever that means.

I'm trying to figure this out. Maybe I'm totally stupid, but I'm not clear about what North Korea stands to gain from missile tests, what China and Russia stand to lose from sanctioning North Korea, how the Bush regime will respond, what the stakes are for the parties involved, or basically anything else about the "missile crisis". (Though I can imagine why Japan might be a little upset).