Back from a looooong weekend with the YearlyKossacks.

Some blogging on it at It Shines for All.

Some blogging on other things over at the RCP blog.

Here? Nothing at all. Except this very post.

How depressing.

Doing some blogging for the N.Y. Sun.

When conservatives make an argument like this, they’re puppets of their corporate overlords. Well, here’s Nick Kristof (no link, since it’s behind the Times Delete firewall — but the column’s name is: "In Praise of the Maligned Sweatshop"):

Africa desperately needs Western help in the form of schools, clinics and sweatshops.

Oops, don’t spill your coffee. We in the West mostly despise sweatshops as exploiters of the poor, while the poor themselves tend to see sweatshops as opportunities.

On a street here in the capital of Namibia, in the southwestern corner of Africa, I spoke to a group of young men who were trying to get hired as day laborers on construction sites.

‘’I come here every day,'’ said Naftal Shaanika, a 20-year-old. ‘’I actually find work only about once a week.'’

Mr. Shaanika and the other young men noted that the construction jobs were dangerous and arduous, and that they would vastly prefer steady jobs in, yes, sweatshops. Sure, sweatshop work is tedious, grueling and sometimes dangerous. But over all, sewing clothes is considerably less dangerous or arduous — or sweaty — than most alternatives in poor countries.

Well-meaning American university students regularly campaign against sweatshops. But instead, anyone who cares about fighting poverty should campaign in favor of sweatshops, demanding that companies set up factories in Africa. If Africa could establish a clothing export industry, that would fight poverty far more effectively than any foreign aid program.

And God bless Kristof for being able to get away with an argument like this. It’s one of the most important arguments that can be made if third-world nations are ever going to develop viable industry.

He does, however, let the college kids off too easily — or, rather, those behind them. These college kids may be "well-meaning," but they’re not organizing themselves. By and large, they’re being used as tools by American organized labor, the interest group that really loses when textile and other manufacturing jobs go to impoverished workers overseas.

I’m not in the habit of praising Kristof, but I’m thinking of outsourcing the job to some sweatshop workers who are no doubt grateful for the work.

June 4, the 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, is memorialized over at YouTube.

Slate has a photo memorial.

Last, but not least, the video…

The most dramatic moment of the protest / counter-protest was this face-to-face confrontation between two very hot-tempered individuals:

Also, I found myself touched by this rendition of the national anthem, from the pro-amnesty side:

You know, something to balance out all those Mexican flags.

(A sidenote: I can’t say how thrilled I am with YouTube. This is the first time I’ve tried uploading to it and using it to videoblog. Quite convenient. I hope they have a plan to make money off of all of this.)

(A sidenote to the sidenote: I took all of this video with a Sony Cybershot DSCP93. Think what you will of my camera work. But the picture and sound were incredible for a device designed to do something else entirely.)

I checked out the immigration protest Saturday morning in New York City, on East 39th Street in front of the Mexican Consulate. I’ve written up a column on it, so I won’t go into too much analysis but I wanted to offer some pictures and video I took.

The whole thing started off very small, with more press than protestors.

Things got a little more interesting, though, when the counter-protestors showed up. (Hint: If you don’t want something to get attention, don’t counter-protest.)

From there, things grew.

If protests are decided by who screams the loudest the longest, the pro-immigration counter-protestors won. And, they retook the Mexican Consulate sidewalk space when the original protestors left.

Further pictures and video to come…

Writing about gay marriage as a straight person means:

1) People assuming I’m gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

2) Right-wing nutcases calling me a whiny faggot for supporting gay marriage

3) Left-wing gays calling me a sell-out house-faggot for supporting a deliberative, democratic and federalist approach to attaining marriage equality

Nos. 1 & 2 don’t bother me tremendously. But No. 3 makes me feel a bit awkward. Essentially, I’m the white person counseling blacks patience during the civil rights movement. Now, I don’t buy a one-for-one equation of gay marriage with the civil rights movement, just to be clear. It does, however, feel odd to tell couples with no legal protection under the law to just sit tight.

Yet I, and no small number of libertarian types such as myself (some gay, some straight), think patience is nonetheless the proper and prudent course here. Acceptance of homosexuality has made tremendous strides in all of our lifetimes. And America is moving — fitfully, slowly, erratically — toward some hodgepodge of marriage, civil unions and domestic partnership rights.

Forcing this to a cataclysmic, all-out fight at the national level can only have one of two outcomes: 1) a Supreme Court decision forcing states to recognize gay marriages, or 2) a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman (and perhaps even closing off the possibility of civil unions, depending on the wording and how it’s interpreted).

So, yes, patience is prudent. A court victory in Massachusetts or New York is satisfying to some gay-marriage supporters in the short term, but it means huge setbacks for gays in other states.

And it could even mean writing anti-gay discrimination into the Constitution.

The AP has an absolutely heartbreaking story. Two girls from the same college were in an accident. One died, and one was struggling to survive. They looked alike, and the hospital mixed them up. One family buried a girl they thought was their daughter. Another family stood vigil by a girl they thought was theirs.

In the last couple days, the mix-up was cleared up, giving one family wonderful news and another family tragic news. Most remarkable, for blog readers at least, the family nursing the girl back to health — the VanRyn family — kept an online journal of the recovery of their "daughter."

Here is the post announcing the stunning news.

Other posts, like this one, are just painful: "If you ask her to look to her right of left she does that most of the
time. As far as recognizing us… we think that sometimes she does, and
sometimes she doesn’t."

Both families seem to be taking the situation as best as could be expected. Neither seems angry at the hospital or emergency staff.

What a strange bond these families now share.