One of the more surreal parts of working on the Buddhism site is cruising around looking for Buddhist news. Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, is always a great source for stories about the wonderful things the government of China is doing for various Buddhist temples and monasteries.

Today I ran into a happy story about repair and restoration work planned for Labrang Monastery, an important monastery in Gansu Province. On the other blog I wrote a roundup of news stories about Labrang Monastery over the past year. Highlights: Arrests, beatings, torture, strip searches, “disappeared” monks.

Somehow, Xinhua left those details out of its happy story. However, Xinhua did link to a charming photo gallery showing happy Tibetans enjoying peace, prosperity and democratic reform under Chinese rule.

The “happy” stories must mostly be for Chinese, who want to believe them. I understand China does a remarkable job of preventing non-Chinese news sources from penetrating the Great Firewall of China. But I find a remarkable number of westerners who believe them also.

The stories of happy happiness remind me of the stories the Right always wanted to come out of Iraq. The Bush Administration should have hired Xinhua to manage Iraq news for them.

E.J. Dionne has another good column today. Last two paragraphs:

The larger problem is the emptiness of all the howling over the long-term deficits. Nibbling away at bits of Obama’s proposed budget will do very little about them. Talk of “entitlement reform” is empty unless we have health-care reform — and unless we acknowledge that we will never cut Medicare and Social Security enough to close the budget gap. In fact, Social Security is more important than ever, now that the value of so many 401(k)s has plummeted.

The task of those who genuinely care about deficits is to make the world safe for tax increases. Under current conditions, it’s a whole lot easier for politicians to talk a lot about deficits, and then just let them grow.