Pressing for freedoms on China's own turf, President Barack Obama said Monday that individual expression is not an American ideal but a universal right that should be available to all.

In his first presidential trip to Asia, Obama lauded cooperative relations with China but sought to send a clear message to his tightly controlled host country. Just as Obama said few problems can be solved unless U.S. and China work together, he prodded China to accept what he called "universal rights."

"We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation," Obama said at a town hall at a museum here, believed to be the first such forum held by a U.S. president on Chinese soil. "But we also don't believe that the principles that we stand for are unique to our nation."

An Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:

It can't get better than this, can it? A first printing of 1.5 million copies sent out into an otherwise dead book market. Possibly as much as $7 million dollars going to the author, who already has interviews lined up with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters. A bus tour of the "real America" that manages to avoid such Sodom and Gomorrah-like Democratic hotspots as Los Angeles and New York. Even a collection of critical essays about the author appearing at the same moment -- with her photo on a similarly designed cover, and just two letters in the title reversed, clearly meant to confuse her fans. Then, there's even the parody coloring book. It's a "perfect storm for publishers," says the book editor for the Christian Science Monitor -- and if that's the last time the phrase "perfect storm" is used for this media extravaganza, TomDispatch will eat its baseball cap.

Yes, of course, what else could I be talking about but Going Rogue, Sarah Palin's as-told-to "memoir" -- and its critical doppelganger, Going Rouge (put together by two Nation magazine editors). I wonder, by the way, if, in the uproar to follow, anyone will comment on the strangeness of Palin's book title. True, late last October, with the presidential election fast approaching, an unnamed aide to candidate McCain accused his vice-presidential partner of "going rogue." At the time, an "associate" of hers responded to the charge by claiming she was "simply trying to 'bust free' of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged [campaign] roll-out." A year later, however, she's evidently ready to make that angry intra-campaign charge proudly her own.

Still, here's the thing that's so odd: since the fall of the Soviet Union, the word "rogue," as in "rogue state," has been associated with only one thing in the U.S.: enemy nations supposedly eager to enter the nuclear proliferation sweepstakes -- in particular, the crew that our previous president lumped together as the "axis of evil." We're talking about Iran, North Korea, Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- and now, evidently, former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Maybe Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, the blistering, bestselling exposé of just how the Republican Party ate itself for lunch, is right. Maybe Palin is intent on going nuclear in American politics. Unfortunately, when the fun's all over, we have no idea who is going to clean up the mess.

How many protesters were in attendance at Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachmann's tea party healthcare protest?

"I climbed the Capitol steps just before the event started so that I could get a good view of the whole crowd," the Washington Post's one-time White House reporter and columnist Dana Milbank wrote Friday. "I divided it into sections and counted. That's where I came up with 5,000. It's possible more came after I did my count, but nothing near 10,000."

A few dozen Republican House members attended, aimed at stirring up a crowd against Democrats' healthcare reform bill. Fox News' Sean Hannity interviewed Bachmann following the event.

"20,000+ people showed up," Hannity said. "Were you as surprised as I was?"

I never thought I'd find myself thanking the women-loathing, Christian fundamentalist-pandering Democrats in Congress for anything, but here it is: Thank you, Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI), for your outrageous amendment to the House version of the health insurance reform legislation in Congress, which bars any insurance company in the proposed health insurance exchange from offering a health insurance plan that includes abortion coverage.

This amendment, which would actually bar women or families from buying even with their own money and no government subsidy health insurance that includes funding for a medically recommended abortion, was supported by 64 Democrats along with all but one Republican in Congress.

Because it passed and was attached to the House health reform bill, it gives hope to the notion that the disastrous so-called health reform legislation in Congress will die.

And so it should.

Was Fort Hood really the target of a terrorist attack? The first clue to the real culprit emerged when Senator Joe Lieberman sought to blame this mass murder on the U.S. military. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, he promised hearings on how the Pentagon protects its personnel from domestic terrorists.

Will Lieberman, an avowed Zionist, use this incident to insist that the U.S. do more to protect Jewish nationalists? More importantly, what do his concerns mean for homeland security?

Joe Lieberman has an ally in Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security. In April, this former Arizona governor warned about potential terrorism from U.S. troops returning from deployment in the Middle East. Though roundly attacked, she defended her position, calling it an "assessment not an accusation."

When Army Major Nidal Hasan killed U.S. troops on the nation's largest military base, was this evidence of "militant Islam"? Or did this military psychiatrist snap under pressure while treating returning vets on a base averaging ten suicides a month? Is there an undisclosed agenda behind those seeking to portray this act as the work of "Islamo fascists"?