And yes, we can indeed. I was swept up with emotions by tonight’s historic revolution. My faith in the United States has been strengthened. I vividly remember the video I saw of Robert Kennedy speaking in Indianapolis on the night that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, telling the mostly black crowd the horrible news and, with his voice tremulous, urging for unity instead of division. It took exactly forty years later until tonight when unity and hope seem to come to fruition finally. It’s a historic night for black Americans, for immigrants like many of us, and for all Americans.

My brother, who spent two years in Africa, who has somehow always shown an interest in the black community, who last weekend took his white wife and their mixed-race kid to Pennsylvania to knock on doors of undecided voters, choked up tonight when we talked on the phone. My father, who lost everything after 1975, who spent his old age cleaning toilets of Silicon Valley companies, also almost cried on the phone. And, perhaps like many of you, my eyes were teared up tonight. The election of Obama as the president of the United States, of my adopted country, as the leader of the free world, confirms what my father, my brother, I, and you have always hoped for but have, deep down in our hearts, held lingering doubts about: that the little guy can make it, that we can rise from the bottom, that nothing is impossible. That, yes, we can.

I am perhaps being too melodramatic tonight. But it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the enormity of tonight’s events. I have so much hope, for me and my wife, for our future children, for my family, for you and your families, for the United States of America, and, for some unclear reason, for Vietnam too. One day, we will hear the chants of “yes, we can” and feel the enthusiasm of youth, the energy of hope, and the sense of service, of living for something larger than yourself, not in Grant Park in Chicago, but in the crowded streets of Saigon and the old quarters of Hanoi, the cool mountains of Lao Cai and the salty marshes of Ca Mau… One day… One day. We will get there.

From the New York Times editorial on September 12th, 2008:

As we watched Sarah Palin on TV the last couple of days, we kept wondering what on earth John McCain was thinking.

If he seriously thought this first-term governor — with less than two years in office — was qualified to be president, if necessary, at such a dangerous time, it raises profound questions about his judgment. If the choice was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible.

It was bad enough that Ms. Palin’s performance in the first televised interviews she has done since she joined the Republican ticket was so visibly scripted and lacking in awareness.

What made it so much worse is the strategy for which the Republicans have made Ms. Palin the frontwoman: win the White House not on ideas, but by denigrating experience, judgment and qualifications.

The idea that Americans want leaders who have none of those things — who are so blindly certain of what Ms. Palin calls “the mission” that they won’t even pause for reflection — shows a contempt for voters and raises frightening questions about how Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin plan to run this country.

One of the many bizarre moments in the questioning by ABC News’s Charles Gibson was when Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, excused her lack of international experience by sneering that Americans don’t want “somebody’s big fat résumé maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state.”

We know we were all supposed to think of Joe Biden. But it sure sounded like a good description of Mr. McCain. Those decades of experience earned the Arizona senator the admiration of people in both parties. They are why he was our preferred candidate in the Republican primaries.

The interviews made clear why Americans should worry about Ms. Palin’s thin résumé and lack of experience. Consider her befuddlement when Mr. Gibson referred to President Bush’s “doctrine” and her remark about having insight into Russia because she can see it from her state.

But that is not what troubled us most about her remarks — and, remember, if they were scripted, that just means that they reflect Mr. McCain’s views all the more closely. Rather, it was the sense that thoughtfulness, knowledge and experience are handicaps for a president in a world populated by Al Qaeda terrorists, a rising China, epidemics of AIDS, poverty and fratricidal war in the developing world and deep economic distress at home.

Ms. Palin talked repeatedly about never blinking. When Mr. McCain asked her to run for vice president? “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission,” she said, that “you can’t blink.”

Fighting terrorism? “We must do whatever it takes, and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.”

Her answers about why she had told her church that President Bush’s failed policy in Iraq was “God’s plan” did nothing to dispel our concerns about her confusion between faith and policy. Her claim that she was quoting a completely unrelated comment by Lincoln was absurd.

This nation has suffered through eight years of an ill-prepared and unblinkingly obstinate president. One who didn’t pause to think before he started a disastrous war of choice in Iraq. One who blithely looked the other way as the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouped in Afghanistan. One who obstinately cut taxes and undercut all efforts at regulation, unleashing today’s profound economic crisis.

In a dangerous world, Americans need a president who knows that real strength requires serious thought and preparation.

HANOI (AFP) — Two Vietnamese journalists who led criticism of a major corruption scandal in the communist country have been arrested for “abuse of power,” media reported on Tuesday.

The journalists, Nguyen Van Hai and Nguyen Viet Chien, work respectively for Tuoi Tre and Thanh Nien. The two daily newspapers were among the most active media covering the scandal when it broke.

Several newspapers reported Tuesday the pair would be detained in preventative custody for four months following their arrest on Monday.

The media also said they had cleared out their homes and offices.

Hai and Chien played a key role in 2006 in the denunciation of the so-called “PMU 18″ scandal which involved a department of the transport ministry in charge of building key infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges.

During their investigation, police suspected the money embezzled from the department, which is funded largely by Japan and the World Bank, was to be wagered on international football matches.

The story broke on the eve of the 10th congress of the ruling communist party but most Vietnamese media gave extensive coverage to the scandal, despite being largely controlled by the state.

But the two journalists’ unusual outspokenness brought them to the attention of then prime minister Phan Van Khai, who called for those spreading “false” news relating to the scandal to be punished.

The arrest of the campaigning reporters provoked a strong response in the editorials carried by their papers.

“There were more than 1,000 news articles on the PMU 18 affair published in nearly 100 newspapers but why were only two journalists from the Thanh Nien and Tuoi Tre arrested? These are questions which demand answers,” the Thanh Nien said.

The Tuoi Tre said its reporter “is paying the price for his news on the PMU-18 affair, a matter which is not yet over but which unravels in a very strange manner.”

The newspaper wrote of a parody of justice in “which the journalist is the victim.”

In 2006, the scandal led to the resignation of transport minister Dao Dinh Binh and the arrest of his deputy, Nguyen Viet Tien.

Last year, eight other former officials were sentenced to up to 13 years in prison, including the former head of department PMU 18, Bui Tien Dung.

They however were convicted of organising illegal bets and trying to use bribery to cover it up.

The Vietnamese press had then sounded the possibility of another case, which could have involved Nguyen Viet Tien.

But the former deputy minister, the most senior official linked to the affair, was cleared in March without facing court.

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Obama’s recent speech on race–you can read the full text here–is one of the most thoughtful political speeches I have encountered. It provides no simplistic interpretation of race in America. It offers no clear solution. It is full of nuances, dwelling into complexities that many other politicians would avoid. Obama respects us. In it, you can hear him saying “I don’t know. It’s a complicated issue.” And I admire him for acknowledging the complexity of the issue and his inability to offer a specific solution.

I surmise that McCain or Clinton would step on the podium and offer a clear-cut solution. They wouldn’t dare to appear anything but confident, even if confidence means offering dumbed-down versions of a complicated issue and either-or solutions similar to the if-not-us-then-them mentality of Bush and his friends.

I respect those who admit that they don’t know because they are often the ones who know the most. They know the limitations of their knowledge. I observe this in the hospital all the time. Medical students rarely say “I don’t know” as they’re terrified of appearing stupid, erasing the chance of getting a High Honors. Many residents have learned the art of avoiding answering the question directly by reciting a fact that is only remotely relevant to the question, hoping to savage their reputation during rounds. Those who quickly and succintly answer “I don’t know” are the few experienced attending physicians.

Somehow we are all too afraid of appearing dumb, even in this age of anti-intellectualism.

She screamed at the top of her lungs every morning when the nurses moved her around to change her sheets. For the rest of the day she was very quiet, often awake with the TV on, staring out the window to watch traffic crawling on Brookline Avenue seven stories below. I had never seen her family visiting her. She supposedly had two grown-up children living somewhere in the Boston area.

“Good morning, Ms…” I said, putting on the yellow gown to protect myself and my other patients from her Clostridium difficile infection.

“Good morning,” she answered cheerfully.

After a few perfunctory greetings, I tested her awareness. “Can you tell me your full name?” She answered without a pause. “Do you know where you are?”

“Beth Israel Deaconess,” she was proud of her response.

“Do you know today’s date?”. She surprised me with a correct answer.

I was elated. I cured her. I fixed her. She was oriented x 3 again.

“I saw your mother this morning and she told me you would be coming,” she said naturally, bringing me back down to earth.

He arrived on the floor with seven or eight friendly, loud friends. They were his roommates, classmates, and just random kids he had just met during the first few months of college. I heard he was out of state and these friends were the only “family” he had tonight. He had a single room so all his friends could sat and stood and talked and laughed around him without disturbing other patients.

“You’re ready?” the attending asked as I approached his workstation. It was almost nine p.m., and I was ready to get out of there. “Let’s do it,” I said. The attending would do most of the talking of course and I would just listen to him telling the young man with lots of friends that he had lymphoma.

I’ve recently come across this nice post from dailykos:

Here, let me tell you a story of someone I knew. Someone who made her life so light that in comparison I might as well be living under a rock.

She worked with me a few years ago, at a time when our office was going through one of its regular interludes of pointless but frenetic activity. In the midst of hundreds of people hurrying to “reform business processes” or “transform the supply chain,” she was a Zen breeze. She came, and she went, with remarkably little “stuff.” No house, no car, next to no furniture in her small apartment.

While the rest of us fretted about where we would work when this company recovered from its bout of mania, she was pondering a question of another sort: what were the lives of women like around the world? Not glamorous women in metropolitan hot spots, but ordinary women in ordinary lives. What did they think? What did they feel? What did they hope for?

So one day, she walked away from the job, reduced everything she owned to the contents of one small backpack, and went to find out.

You can read the whole post here.

“Hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It’s not sitting on the sideline or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it… Hope is the bedrock of this nation, the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is but who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”

And this is why I support Obama for president of the United of States of America. Besides his policies most of which I agree with, he stands for hope. It has been so long since we have a leader who can inspire us all to do what should be done, to believe in our capacity for change, to rise above the cynicism that maintains a status quo where poverty, lack of health care, injustices are accepted as inevitable facts of modern life. Obama inspires us to hope for a better future and, instead of merely hoping, to fight for what is right. Obama is the one who can lead and unite this country, who will tell us what he believes is right, not just what we want to know.

All presidents are severely limited in what they can do in office. But we want someone who inspires us to “remake the world as it should be.” That someone in 1968 was Robert Kennedy. And that someone in 2008 is Barack Obama.

The long corridors of the hospital are quiet tonight. Most of the patients are sleeping the night away, unaware of the coming new year. A few are agitated and confused as usual, having no idea where they are and who they are.

It sucks being here tonight. Wishing I could be home, cuddling with my wife on our couch in front of the fireplace.

Happy New… damn, my pager is going off again.

On his blog, Rich Streitmatter-Tran raised the question why the Vietnamese media had been mute on the Burmese protests. He noted that just a few days prior to the protests, the Vietnamese prime minister led a delegation including the CEO of VietnamPetrol on a visit to Burma, signing an energy-dealing agreement with the brutal military government.

For sources and Rich’s complete post, click here.