[a technical glitz made this post invisible–until now].

   Maybe it’s the beautiful spring air but my mind is off in other directions than usual. So, here are two seemingly unrelated things that caught my attention that are actually related.

First, is it just me or did anyone else pick up on the stark and obvious contrast between the way the Chinese premier reacted to the earthquake in his country versus the way our pathetic president couldn’t wrap his mind around the devastation in New Orleans? In China, within hours, you have the premier, bullhorn in hand, clambering over rubble to assure trapped people that help is on the way:

Clambering over shattered buildings, tearfully comforting weeping children, hollering into a bullhorn, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has become the unusually open and emotional face of his nation’s response to calamity.

The 65-year-old head of government has dominated China’s public handling of its worst earthquake in 32 years, rushing to the scene hours after the 7.9 magnitude tremor hit on Monday.

To judge from scenes of Wen in the worst-hit parts of Sichuan province, he is treating the disaster as a very personal test of his and his government’s bonds with the people.

Visiting one of the many schools toppled by the quake, Wen marched through mud and shards of concrete and tile, and wept "hot tears" when he reached rescuers trying to dig out two trapped children, the People’s Daily reported on Wednesday.

"I’m grandpa Wen Jiabao. You children will certainly be able to tough this out and be rescued," Wen yelled into the crevice.

Contrast that to our president who, first, couldn’t comprehend that there was a disaster happening in New Orleans (mainly, because it was happening to black people) and, then, days later, when he finally tries to get a first hand-look, he does so from the safety of his plane.

But, the bankruptcy of vision, compassion and logic is even more pronounced, comically, by this story in today’s The New York Times:

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Custom and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

    ASYLUM FROM ITALY!!!??? Wouldn’t George Orwell just love this? Stephen Colbert, are you there? This is where we have arrived–the insanity of the national security panic, the color coded alerts, the threats to "obliterate" other countries, the absolute bankruptcy of this Administration’s approach to the world…leads naturally to an official at the border believing that someone could be asking for asylum from ITALY!!!

   Help me. My head hurts–from laughing and crying.