TooMuchBlue

My collection of rants and raves about technology, my kids and family, social/cultural phenomena, and inconsistencies in the media and politics.

2006-10-27

Camille Paglia gets it... sort of

You know it’s pretty bad when even some Democrats in the MSM (Camille Paglia in this case) are describing the Foley incident with words like “collusion” and “suspiciously” - and they’re talking about the Democrats and MSM!

The way the Democratic leadership was in clear collusion with the major media to push this story in the month before the midterm election seems to me to have been a big fat gift to Ann Coulter and the other conservative commentators who say the mainstream media are simply the lapdogs of the Democrats. Every time I turned on the news it was "Foley, Foley, Foley!" -- and in suspiciously similar language and repetitive talking points.

After three or four days of it, as soon as I heard Foley's name, I turned the sound off or switched channels. It was gargantuan overkill, and I felt the Democrats were shooting themselves in the foot. I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor judgment but positively evil.

The article digresses into a rationalization of the nobility of homosexuality, but then acknowledges Matt Drudge’s coverage of the issue.

The Foley scandal exploded without any proof of a documented sex act -- unlike the case of the late congressman Gerry Studds, who had sex with a page and who was literally applauded by fellow Democrats when they refused to vote for his censure. In the Foley case, there was far more ambiguous evidence -- suggestive e-mails and instant messages. Matt Drudge, to his great credit, began hitting this issue right off the bat on his Web site and radio show. What does it mean for Democrats to be agitating over Web communications, which in my view fall under the province of free speech? It's a civil liberties issue. We can say that what Foley was doing was utterly inappropriate, professionally irresponsible, and in bad taste, but why were liberals fomenting a scandal day after day after day over words being used? And why didn't Democrats notice that they were drifting into an area which has been the province of the right wing -- that is, the attempt to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web? It's very worrisome and yet more proof that the Democrats have lost their way.

I, for one, would welcome a future where the GOP has a real Democratic party to compete with.The irony of this article is the self-feeding nature of the “interview”. The two parties in this “interview” are an anonymous Salon reporter and one of Salon’s founding contributors. This is less interview than a transcript over lunch, and the flow of the interview reflects that. Continuing immediately after the previous quote:

It also advances a line the far Christian right has employed for years -- to make a connection between gay men and child molesters. It's one of the most despicable smears imaginable.

And with the Democrats' record of sex scandals, what the hell were they thinking of? For heaven's sake, after we just got through the whole Clinton maelstrom!

The boldface indicates that the interviewer speaking. In a trial court, this is known as “leading the witness”. In modern journalism, it’s “expanding on a point”.

Still, I am pleased to hear a self-proclaimed Democrat and atheist make some of these points that are often lost on the left:

I think the center of the Republican Party really is small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it's job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy -- not government intervention and government control, that suffocating nanny-state mentality. The Democrats are in some sort of time warp in always proposing a government solution to every problem. It's like Hillary's philosophy that it takes a village to raise a child. Well, does it? Or does it take a strong family and not the village?

What's broadened the appeal of conservatism in recent years is that Republicans stress individualism -- individual effort and personal responsibility. They're really the liberty party now -- I thought my party was! It used to seem as if the Republicans were authoritarians and the Democrats were for free speech and for the freedom to live your own life and pursue happiness. But the Democrats have wandered away from their own foundational principles.

The Democrats have to start fresh and throw out the entire party superstructure. I was bitterly disappointed after voting for Ralph Nader that he didn't devote himself to helping build a strong third party in this country. When the American economy was still manufacturing based, the trade unions were viable, and the Democrats stayed close to their working-class roots. But now the Northeastern Democrats, with their fancy law degrees and cocktail parties, have simply become peddlers of condescending bromides about "the people."

I, for one, would welcome a future where the GOP has a real Democratic party to compete with. Today, only the Republican party seems to have anything close to a grasp of reality, and even if I agree with them, that’s still not choice. If the Democrats would get back to what they supposedly stand for and stop trying to be more like Europe, we might actually have some thought-provoking choices in the voting booth.

But Clinton went off on a tirade, waved his finger in Chris Wallace's face, and accused him of sitting there with a "smirk." That was over-personalizing the interview by any standard. And to charge Wallace with setting his guest up, with ambush journalism -- good heavens, the problem with American journalism is hardly that it's too severe and punitive. [...] So for Clinton to make a huge fuss about a mild question about his administration's record in dealing with Osama bin Laden was a bullying of our journalists -- an act of war, in fact, on American journalists, saying, "Don't you dare go off our agreed-to list of questions!"

...

The recent filing for bankruptcy by Air America dramatizes my party's abject failure to produce shows that are informative and entertaining and that systematically build an audience -- the way all the top radio hosts did who climbed the ladder from obscurity to their present prominence. Aren't we the party of Hollywood? The fact that we've failed so miserably at this central medium of communication shows how something has gone very wrong in Democratic sensibility.

Preach it, sister! Speaking of religion...

It seems like religion has never been a bigger issue in American politics, recognized on both sides of the aisle as something that needs to be addressed. Have the Democrats changed the longtime Republican characterization of them as godless?

Well, as long as the Democrats are perceived as the anti-religion party, we're going to lose the culture wars. That's why Hillary has made such a show of churchgoing and wearing crucifixes -- even while there seems to be little connection between her Christian ideals and her backstage activities as a politician and money raiser. But religion is absolutely central to this country in ways that Europe's secularized intellectuals fail to understand. I'm speaking here as an atheist who studies religion and respects it enormously. In the history of mankind, the benefits that religion has brought to society in shaping behavior and moral choice are overwhelming in comparison to the negatives, which anyone can list -- like religious wars and bigotry. Without religion, we'd have anarchy.

It’s good to hear that some Democrats actually get it on some of these issues. I don’t mean that as a slam against Democrats in general, but the people who get the press time seem to me to be totally disconnected from reality here in “flyover country”.

[via Drudge]

Related posts: Point:Counterpoint, Too much truth in one place, Meta-meta-meta-censorship, The future of news, Foley, A great choice for President, On chickens and roosts

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2 Comments:

  • At 10:25 AM CDT , steve581 said...

    I dont know if its out of desperation or just poor planned political strategy that the democratic party has seemed to gone off the deep end. I considered myself left of center until i became so turned off by the lefts antics and virtual obsession with regaining power these past few years.
    Paglia's comments about the foley issue are dead on and are a microcosim of how democrats employ their tactics as though the voting age has been reduced to 9.
    Turning on MSM news to be bombarded with democrats always attacking yet never offering solutions, makes me feel like i have an arrogant vacuum cleaner salesman in my house and he thinks im a absolute dumbass. He wants me to buy his vacuum without any demonstration or reasons other than he personally hates the brand of vacuum that i own! WTF?
    I wonder if todays democratic leaders ever quietly reflect on how far they have strayed from someone like John f Kennedy? I suspect they're too busy bashing on Bush and thinking they're making progress to even have time to consider it.

     
  • At 11:17 AM CDT , Bruce said...

    I think you're right, steve581. It's not so much that they planned to go here, but they got so caught up in differentiating themselves from the Republicans that they eventually had little more to add other than "we're not like them".

    The "big tent" of the Democratic party may have become so big that people at opposite corners of the "tent" are so ideologically different as to be unable to agree on a compelling vision.

    Thanks for your comments. Dialogue is better than Monologue any day.

     

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2006-10-24

Firefox 2.0

I’m maybe in the first hundred, probably the first thousand people to download the newly released version of Firefox.

The new version loads up quick, the new look is nice, 10 of my 19 extensions were compatible, 7 more were ready with an upgrade. IE7 (released a couple of weeks ago) had better be pretty sweet, or it doesn’t stand a chance.

Related posts: Invasion of the forum snatchers, Do the shuffle

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2006-10-23

Spam update

Looks like that forum invasion may have caused my spam count to skyrocket. Either that, or a recent bugzilla release.

I was offline for the weekend. To get an accurate count, I started by going into my Junk folder and marked everything “read”, and deleted any junk with a future date. Thunderbird automatically purged off junk mail older than a week. This left 481 items in my junk folder, about 96 per day, given that I hadn’t checked mail since Friday. Until recently, I was down to about 70 per day.

Between Friday evening about 7 pm and Monday at 10:15, I received 356 new pieces of email through toomuchblue. Of these, 188 (52%) were automatically recognized as junk, and I manually flagged another 84 (24%) as junk. At least three out of every four pieces of mail I receive is spam.

Out of these, at least 7 were future-dated. I can’t say exactly, because I don’t know when these emails were sent, nor from what timezone. (I could probably find out by reading the headers, but this is a curiosity, not a compulsion). My hunch is that about 50 of these were future dated. It’s possible some of the 356 emails were junk mail past-dated more than a week in the past. If so, Thunderbird purged them before I could count them.

I also received quite a bit of legitimate mail:

  • 52 email notifications from various FreeBSD servers.
  • Five from email lists
  • Four from webservers of my clients
  • Three marketing pieces from companies I’ve used in the past. (These are annoying, but not spam since I do business with them.)
  • Two legitimate bill notices from companies I use.
  • One baby picture from friends

That leaves 17 unaccounted for. I imagine these are probably more spam.

So in summary:

  • I get a lot of mail.
  • I’m up to about 108 pieces of spam a day.
  • If you sent me an email and I haven’t answered yet, it’s just possible it got lost in the noise.
  • Time to blackhole a few more addresses.

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2006-10-17

Invasion of the forum snatchers

My website just got hacked. OK, a small little portion of it. It’s just the old Forum pages I used to use. They’re not linked from anywhere anymore, but somebody found it under the incredibly easy-to-guess path of /forum, exploited a hole in PHP-BB (there are many!) and replaced the look with their own.

So my imminent, urgent project is:

  1. Move the site to a new directory so they stay the heck out of there.
  2. Revert to something I can actually see. (Their change throws a huge image over the top of everything.)
  3. Check for more significant damage.
  4. Fess up to the guy who hosts my site, so he can check for damage.
  5. Maybe possibly find the time to get the content out of there that I actually care about, and delete the darn thing.

So far, it just looks like a defacement with no permanent harm, but only time will tell.

Grumble, grumble!

Update: Turns out they hadn’t done much damage at all. The exploit they found only allowed them to create a forum of their own creation. They pasted an entire web page into the “description” field, which sat on top of the rest of the site. It looks like they tried to embed some flash movies as well. I didn’t recognize the faces, but it appeared to be Palestinian-sympathetic. People holding guns, mothers crying. I didn’t watch to the end.

I guess this means the war has made it as far as my website.

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The hat looks nice too...

Ethan thinks I'm taking his picture because he looks good wearing his hat.

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2006-10-14

From the you-do-the-math department

A death-row inmate who has been in solitary confinement for over a year is medically confirmed to be 11 weeks pregnant. Uh huh. Read it for yourself.

The report said it was the first time that a death-row prisoner had become pregnant in Vietnam and that police were investigating how it had happened.

[Nguyen Thi] Oanh's husband was serving a jail sentence at another prison in another province, the newspaper said.

Oanh was due to face a firing squad this year after losing her appeal against the death sentence she received last year for possession of a billion dong ($63,000) worth of heroin.

“Police are investigating how it happened.” Anyone over the age of 16 (I’m being generous here) knows how it happened. The guards obviously did some math and invented a new “fringe benefit” of employment. The question is not how but who?

Oddly enough, the people who flock to every apparition of the Virgin Mary are not making the trek to witness this apparent new Immaculate Conception. Must be a bit far for a pilgrimage this time of year. Or maybe they just can’t get clearance to visit a death-row inmate in solitary confinement.

The moral of the story: don’t get imprisoned in a third world country, especially if you’re a woman.

[via Drudge]

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2006-10-13

Point:Counterpoint

After reading Geoffrey R. Stone’s column “What it means to be a liberal” from the Chicago Tribune, and “What It Means To Be A Conservative”, Cassandra’s point-by-point response, I felt like these two documents deserve a side-by-side comparison. Hopefully, reposting both in full won’t get me in any kind of trouble with either party.

This comparison really highlights for me the ways that Liberals misunderstand or mischaracterize Conservatives. I’m sure there’s some of that going the other direction as well, and I’m probably too close to this issue to spot it. Despite Stone’s suggestion in point 1, I am very interested in finding my biases so I can better understand those I disagree with.

Comments?

What it means to be a liberal What it means to be a conservative
For most of the past four decades, liberals have been in retreat. Since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, Republicans have controlled the White House 70 percent of the time and Republican presidents have made 86 percent of the U.S. Supreme Court appointments. In many quarters, the word "liberal" has become a pejorative. Part of the problem is that liberals have failed to define themselves and to state clearly what they believe. As a liberal, I find that appalling.

In that light, I thought it might be interesting to try to articulate 10 propositions that seem to me to define "liberal" today. Undoubtedly, not all liberals embrace all of these propositions, and many conservatives embrace at least some of them.

Moreover, because 10 is a small number, the list is not exhaustive. And because these propositions will in some instances conflict, the "liberal" position on a specific issue may not always be predictable. My goal, however, is not to end discussion, but to invite debate.

In response to something Charlottesvillian posted on What it means to be a Liberal, my off the cuff ideas on what it means (at least to me) to be a conservative:
1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that "time has upset many fighting faiths." Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate. 1. Conservatives believe that while many matters are open to debate, there are also some eternal truths. We do not believe right and wrong are flexible concepts, wholly dependent on one's frame of reference.

Like Liberals, Conservatives are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate. Moreover, we understand that in a society where people use threats or intimidation to force their views on others, enforcing the rules is needed or our rights become meaningless.

One cannot "fairly and open-mindedly consider the truths of others" if speakers are shouted down or forced off the stage, no matter how distasteful their ideas may be. The way to defeat inferior ideas is with better ideas, not with brickbats or heavy-handed threats of government censorship.

2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support the civil rights movement, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment and the rights of gays and lesbians. (Note that a conflict between propositions 1 and 2 leads to divisions among liberals on issues like pornography and hate speech.) 2. Conservatives believe we have an obligation to live together peaceably and tolerate each other's differences, but we have no duty to subsidize, support, or lend our approval to choices we find wrong or destructive. Responsible adults understand that we all make our own way in life. While we have no right to interfere with the lives of our neighbors, they have no right to reach into our pockets and ask us to pay for the consequences of lifestyle choices that we may find difficult to understand or approve of.

We do not ask that they change what they are doing. We only ask that they not expect us to fund a lifestyle we don't agree with. Live and let live. This, to us, is the true meaning of tolerance.

3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion expansion of the franchise; the elimination of obstacles to voting; "one person, one vote;" limits on partisan gerrymandering; campaign-finance reform; and a more vibrant freedom of speech. They believe, with Justice Louis Brandeis, that "the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people." 3. Like Liberals, conservatives believe individuals ought to participate in public debate. However we are not inclined to force them, or to round them up like cattle come Election Day. We believe voting is an individual responsibility, and we have seen what happens when liberals load first-time voters who don't understand how to fill out a ballot, or even know the names of the candidates or what they stand for, onto buses on election day to swell the ranks of Democrat voters.

These people are not stupid, but they are not prepared to vote and the nation is not well served by sending an uninformed electorate to the polls. The nation is also not well served when the parties exacerbate racial tensions at election time.

4. Liberals believe "we the people" are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind. It is liberals who have defended and continue to defend the freedom of the press to investigate and challenge the government, the protection of individual privacy from overbearing government monitoring, and the right of individuals to reproductive freedom. (Note that libertarians, often thought of as "conservatives," share this value with liberals.)

4. Conservatives see government as a social contract in which individuals freely and intelligently barter some small part of their freedoms for mutual protection from the more rapacious elements of human society. This is a factor which Liberals often forget, preferring to take all the benefits of government protection while giving up none of their freedom, an inherently unworkable proposition. With their inherent suspicion of all authority liberals cede too much power to the press, setting up a completely unelected and unaccountable fourth branch of government which openly defies the law with complete impunity, releasing classified information at will, blowing federal terrorism investigations, interfering with law enforcement, and defying grand juries. Liberals are fond of talking about reproductive freedom and "choice", but their rhetoric conveniently ignores the fact that men have exactly zero reproductive choice:
Legally, from the point of view of a woman: the fetus is a lump of tissue which may be excised at will if she subsequently regrets having conceived a child. It imposes no obligation or legal duty unless she chooses to accept it.

Legally, from the point of view of the man: the fetus is a human being which must be allowed to live, even if he subsequently regrets having conceived a child. It imposes an absolute and irrevocable legal duty, regardless of his wishes in the matter.

5. Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion the rights of racial, religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, persons accused of crime and the outcasts of society. It is liberals who have insisted on the right to counsel, a broad application of the right to due process of law and the principle of equal protection for all people. 5. Conservatives believe that justice ought to be blind: there should not be different laws for whites, blacks, Latinos, females, gays, or other demographics. We are not blind to the fact that humans can and do discriminate, but we do not believe the law should, in addition to the thousand inherent injustices and inequalities which exist in nature, impose additional unfairness via our justice system.

How does a human system weigh unfairness? How do we compensate individuals for the hardships imposed by skin color? Gender? Nationality? What if there are offsetting factors - what then? Does that rich black kid who ends up at Harvard get the same compensation as a poor black kid from the inner city? How about the poor disadvantaged white boy from West Virginia with the alcoholic parents? Does he get nothing, just because his skin is the wrong color? Isn't that institutionalized racism? Or is it just Liberal values in action? Equal protection is often what liberals call a "code word" for making exceptions in treatment based on race or gender. Enforce the laws strictly, across the board, regardless of gender or skin color. Period.

6. Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support government programs to improve health care, education, social security, job training and welfare for the neediest members of society. It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to "promote the general welfare." 6. Conservatives believe people have a fundamental duty to help themselves and they will be stronger and better if they develop the habit of self-reliance rather than dependence on government. We don't believe people are helped by programs that sap personal industry and initiative and undermine family bonds, as Daniel Moynihan warned in the 1960s. Rather, we prefer to see the private sector handle charitable giving, perhaps with tax incentives to encourage donation. This is a more ethical alternative to forcibly appropriating the paychecks of the more productive members of society to support less productive members, regardless of the wishes of the former.
7. Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith. It is liberals who have opposed and continue to oppose school prayer and the teaching of creationism in public schools and who support government funding for stem-cell research, the rights of gays and lesbians and the freedom of choice for women. 7. Most conservatives don't wish to see entanglement of church and state either. The difference between liberals and conservatives here is that conservatives understand the purpose of Establishment Clause was to protect the free exercise of religion, not to drive all mention of God from public life. Even non-churchgoing conservatives like me are offended by the ACLU's open persecution of Christians and Christian symbology. Not every historic cross on a county or city seal amounts to state sponsorship of religion and the miscasting of abortion as a religious debate is beyond dishonest. There are atheist liberals who oppose abortion and religious conservatives who are pro-choice. The Left's near-obsession with, and paranoia about, religion is as good a proof as any that the Party of Tolerance and Diversity, isn't.
8. Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. It is principally liberal judges and justices who have preserved and continue to preserve freedom of expression, individual privacy, freedom of religion and due process of law. (Conservative judges and justices more often wield judicial authority to protect property rights and the interests of corporations, commercial advertisers and the wealthy.) 8. Conservatives understand that our individual liberties are bound up in many of those larger societal rights liberals love to decry. Try exercising your so-called "individual" rights (your sexual freedom, perhaps?) once the city you live in has eminent domained your home right out from under your feet, a lovely court decision for which you may thank the liberal half of SCOTUS and its stunning disregard for the original, and quite plain, meaning of the Public Use clause. There is such a thing as competing interests, like the tension between freedom and security. Liberals like to argue, because we already have security, that personal freedom should somehow be unlimited. But without the former we will not long possess the latter. They are intertwined.

Our fellow humans prey on the helpless and on children and and liberals (in addition to championing some very valuable causes) have also championed some pretty worthless causes like the freedom to view child pornography (which is illegal) and the freedom of ten year old girls to get abortions without their parents finding out. Personally I am not convinced a ten year old girl really needs the freedom to have sex with pedophiles. She is not a "woman" yet, so it is neither a "woman's right to choose" nor a "woman's sexual privacy" that is at issue. But apparently this shocking opinion makes me some sort of snake handling Jesus freak, though I don't attend church and am something of a libertarian.

Not all individual freedoms are worth protecting.

9. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. This, of course, is less a tenet of liberalism than a reply to those who attack liberalism. The accusation that liberals are unwilling to protect the nation from internal and external dangers is false. Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens.

9. In response to the liberal statement of belief below, conservatives believe government must protect us also. What we believe, however, is that liberals often assert the rights of individuals over the collective right of society to be secure, often to a degree that is unreasonable. A good example is the NSA wiretapping brouhaha. Most Americans when polled don't object to having the NSA monitor and sample from a large number of calls. They understand the risks and they don't wholly trust the government, but they also understand the risks of inaction, and on balance they trust our own government more than they do the terrorists. Liberals, on the other hand, have allowed their dislike of this administration to lead them to make statements like "the administration is more of a danger to our freedoms than the terrorists".

The bottom line is that they may well believe that, but they don't have the right to allow their subjective doubts to imperil the rest of us, and unless and until Congress is willing to call a halt to the NSA program (and it's not) they need to stop with the conspiracy theories. The truth is that democracy is functioning exactly as it should. They are simply outnumbered and their side didn't win the argument. Get over it.

Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. This, of course, is less a tenet of liberalism than a reply to those who attack liberalism. The accusation that liberals are unwilling to protect the nation from internal and external dangers is false. Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens.
10. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values. It is liberals who have demanded and continue to demand legal protections to avoid the conviction of innocent people in the criminal justice system, reasonable restraints on government surveillance of American citizens, and fair procedures to ensure that alleged enemy combatants are in fact enemy combatants. Liberals adhere to the view expressed by Brandeis some 80 years ago: "Those who won our independence ... did not exalt order at the cost of liberty." 10. Conservatives believe there is an inherent tension between the rights of the accused and the safety of citizens. Therefore government must intelligently balance the rights of accused criminals against the rights of crime victims and ordinary citizens to be secure in their homes and on the streets. There is no liberty without security. On the extreme end of the scale, when we have liberal judges defining pedophilia as a disease and letting defendants off because they're "sorry" (there's an inconvenient truth for you), something is wrong. This is about as fair to your average liberal as tarring all conservatives with the excesses of the religious right, but it is liberal philosophy carried to the illogical extreme: individual rights trumping societal rights. Yet liberals can and do tar conservatives with that broad brush - all the time.

[via Patterico]

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2006-10-12

Non.political post of the day

The two most important women in my life.

This message was sent using PIX-FLIX Messaging service from Verizon Wireless! To learn how you can snap pictures with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/getitnow/getpix. To learn how you can record videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/getitnow/getflix. To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime® 6.5 or higher is required. Visit www.apple.com/quicktime/download to download the free player or upgrade your existing QuickTime® Player. Note: During the download process when asked to choose an installation type (Minimum, Recommended or Custom), select Minimum for faster download.

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2006-10-11

Too much truth in one place

You’ve got to see this video. It’s created by David Zucker, the producer/director of “Airplane”, “The Naked Gun” and “Scary Movie 4” with the intention of allowing the GOP to use it in campaigns. Zucker, a longtime Democrat, voted Republican in 2004 based on concerns he had about national security.

One GOP strategist said "jaws dropped" when the ad was first viewed. "Nobody could believe Zucker thought any political organization could use this ad. It makes a point, but it's way over the top."

The comedy is polished, and the point it makes is rock solid. It's too bad this is so politically hot that it can't be used, so I'm doing my part to make sure people can see it. Hopefully it will stay up for a while. I’ve created a transcript of the video in case it’s taken down. Please email people to the link below instead of just forwarding this message.

Announcer: In the year 2000, in an effort to stop the North Koreans from building nuclear weapons, President Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright [“Pyongyang - North Korea” Pan in on North Korean state building (?)] gave North Korean leader Kim Jong Il a basketball signed by Michael Jordan. [“October 25, 2000”, MA presenting basketball to KJI, clinking glasses for cameras. “We’re not making this up”]

A: The Democrats’ thoughtful gift had two major results. This first was this. [Rocket launch] And the second was this. [KJI playing basketball]

A: In a post-9/11 world, [U.S. Embassy - Tanzania] making nice to our enemies [U.S.S. Cole - Yemen] will not make them nice to us.

A: On the contrary, to them it is a sign of weakness. [MA serving cookies and singing Kum Ba Yah in the house while terrorists run from the basement. Singing continues to end.]

A: The Democrats have their own ideas on how to stop North Korea from building nuclear weapons. [“North Korean Nuclear Weapons Lab”, MA mowing the lawn]

A: Some people think the terrorists will change their ways if only show our good intentions. No matter what we do, the fact remains there is evil in the world. [“Afghanistan”, cave interior, MA painting cave wall while Osama Bin Laden lookalike holding gun makes a video.]

OBL: You missed a spot

A: History has taught us that evil needs to be confronted, not appeased. Evil dictators will be evil dictators, no matter what we do. [MA changes the tire on a Middle Eastern dictator’s limousine.]

Dictator: “Place the bomb in the cargo hold.” [points at watch]

A: Unlike basketball... [KJI coming off the bench at a basketball game]

MA: “Go get 'em you animal”

A: ...the security of the United States is not a game. [MA waving pom poms, fans holding signs reading “go great leader”. KJI comes up from fall with an automatic rifle.]

A: Can we afford a party that treats it like one? [Gunshots, crowd runs, zoom on scared MA staring into camera, fade to black]

[via Drudge]

Related posts: Foley, A great choice for President, On chickens and roosts, Armed and Dangerous

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2006-10-09

Meta-meta-meta-censorship

The New York Times has managed to not only censor themselves about censorship, but to do it in a story about censorship.

The article ironically notes:
Many, but not all, newspapers were frightened away from publication of the Muhammad cartoons. But the cartoons, and other images of Muhammad, can be found all over the Internet, as individual users decide for themselves whether or not they will abide by the Islamic restrictions on Muhammad imagery.

Yes, many newspapers were frightened to publish the Mohammed cartoons. But the article fails to note that one of the papers “frightened away from publication” was the New York Times — the very paper in which the article itself appears. As this FIRE article explained:

On February 7, Times editor Bill Keller told USA Today that publishing the Mohammed cartoons would be “perceived as a particularly deliberate insult” by Muslims, and that, moreover, not publishing them “feels like the right thing to do.”

To recap, as Rick Ellensburg might say: it’s an article about appeasing Muslims by censoring ideas — in a paper that appeased Muslims by censoring ideas. And, the article censors the fact that it appeased Muslims by censoring ideas.

Censorship isn't enough for these guys, and neither is meta-censorship. They've gotta fall all over themselves to make sure they don't upset any radical islamists by even admitting that they soft-pedaled information that might have upset them. And all this in a story where they click their tongues about how YouTube was cleaning up some politically awkward content.

What bold journalists! Determined to present all the news that’s fit to print (so long as it doesn’t upset people who don’t like us anyway).

I’m repeatedly shocked at how hard some elements of the Lamestream Media seem to be working on behalf of our enemies, when freedom of the press is one of the first things a global Caliphate would take away. (Along with making homosexuality a capital offense, but that’s a different topic.)

[via Patterico]

Related post: The future of news

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2006-10-07

Car Wash

Me and my shopping buddy.

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2006-10-06

The future of news

I love it when a blog post writes itself. You might think I’d been searching all day for this, but I stumbled on it at the end of the day as I was skimming for news.

Editor Len Downie of the Washington Post seems to have a really good grasp on how blogging and news should interact and interrelate.

Reporters love newsroom blogs, said Downie, because they put writers in better touch with their readers: "Everyone in our newsroom wants to be a blogger."

And the blogs that pick apart every article that the Post produces are a good thing, said Downie, because they "keep the paper honest" and, even if their commentary isn't positive, bring people to the site.

"Blogs are not competitors and not problems," he said. "Instead we have a very interesting symbiotic relationship. Our largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge."

When newspapers first came into being, they existed to bring the facts (only the facts) of the news to the attention of people it directly affected. With a small circulation paper, a significant percentage of the readership had enough information to verify the credibility of a story. If the paper made up their facts, they didn’t last long. That is, unless there was nobody in town knowledgeable about that topic - then they could get away with murder.

When newspapers went from local to regional to greater-metropolitan, a certain amount of dialog and cross-checking by the public was lost. The number of people who were close enough to the story to cross-check it got smaller, and with no useful way for that small minority to sound the alarm, the value of the news diminished as well.

Business travel and frequent flyer miles created the niche for USA Today and phenomena like national delivery of the New York Times. With so much power, newspapers have become whatever they want to be without the checks-and-balances afforded by reader interaction.

Enter the internet, newsroom blogs, and personal blogs. Now that everyone can be a publisher of their own little small-circulation paper, the landscape has shifted, and I think this is overall for the better. Where once the local readers would provide the cross-check on a story, now bloggers can identify when a story smells and tell people about it more widely than ever before. PowerLine owes a great deal of their popularity to the Rathergate incident.

Better still, “not having an expert in town” is pretty much a thing of the past. If you can think of a topic, there’s bound to be someone out there who calls it their passion. More than likely, there’s a website devoted to the topic, or even a webring. If those people get wind of the issue, they’re likely to comment, either on the news site or their own. Truth wants to be free and - so long as we still have freedom of speech - is very likely to be out there.

[via - who else? - Drudge]

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2006-10-05

Do the shuffle

Found some cool software on the net today. Taskbar Shuffle allows you to drag and drop the tasks on your taskbar around to put them in the order you prefer. As a side benefit, it also gives you easier access to the Windows “task grouping” settings.

This is especially wonderful if, like me, you use a multi-line Taskbar, and have between 10 and 30 tasks running at once. Yes, this is my real task bar, with a fairly light number of tasks. Hey, I’m trying to go home soon.

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2006-10-03

Foley

I’m disturbed by a lot of things in the scandal about Mark Foley, but not necessarily all the things the MSM would like.

  • First of all, it’s disturbing to the core that any adult would proposition a child. The homosexual slant, the location (Congress) and specific person (chair of a committee for child protection) only compound this main problem.
  • Foley’s excuse is that he was drunk, and he says he resigned in order to enter an alcohol rehab center. This is nothing short of a thinly veiled plea-bargain with the public. Propositioning a minor is a crime, elected official or not.
  • Besides the plea-bargain, I’m also concerned that this escape will further reinforce the idea that homosexuals “just can’t help it” and that somehow their urges are beyond their control. When heterosexual people don’t control their sexual urges, it’s called rape, adultery, child abuse, and many other things.
  • The page (the youth who Foley propositioned) was obviously baiting the Congressman in the conversations. As a minor he is entitled to some protections, and the adult in this situation is obviously far more culpable, but I think the page should also face some investigation and possible charges.
  • I’m bothered by the appearance that several news agencies had this story for some months and sat on it. There’s some suggestions they did so to avoid appearing like they attacked him because he was gay. Crime is crime, even if you’re gay.
  • The ABC reporter said he didn’t report it until now because he was too busy covering the anniversaries of Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. Yet for any Republican who knew about this even a day before the story was broken, it’s all about “the safety of children”.
  • I’m bothered that the Washington Post has already started calling for Speaker Denis Hastert’s resignation before all the facts are out.
  • I’m concerned at how willing the Republican party seems to be to throw each other off the island in order to appease the left and the media.
  • Biased reporting is a concern, as always. Remember Barney Frank, who used his Congressional influence to get his homosexual-boyfriend-prostitute out of 30-odd parking tickets? Not many in the press seems to remember. Frank neither resigned nor checked into any kind of rehab. Today he’s one of the most influential members of the House.
  • I’m highly disturbed that someone like Foley could be elected in the first place, regardless of party affiliation. By that, I mean someone whose character allows them to proposition children over an extended period of time, lie repeatedly when confronted, and then bails out on an excuse. Representatives need to be accountable and honest.
  • As an extension of that last thought, I’m bothered to think how many other skeletons are in the closet. Foley’s emails (known for several months) were perhaps over-friendly, but not criminal, but even at that they were a big waving red flag. If Foley had been censured or asked to step down at that point, the damage (to the kids, to the GOP, to his reputation, to the people of Florida) could have been much less. What kind of culture in Congress allows someone with these habits to be given more time to cause damage?

Related posts: A great choice for President, On chickens and roosts

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2 Comments:

  • At 11:41 PM CDT , Righteous Bubba said...

    Biased reporting is a concern, as always. Remember Barney Frank, who used his Congressional influence to get his homosexual-boyfriend-prostitute out of 30-odd parking tickets? Not many in the press seems to remember. Frank neither resigned nor checked into any kind of rehab. Today he’s one of the most influential members of the House.

    How does this play into press bias if they don't bring up a scandal that happened 17 years ago?

    This is pretty much bullshit. Frank should have been turfed of course, but fixing parking tickets for a hooker is rather different than stalking 16-year olds.

     
  • At 1:12 PM CDT , Bruce said...

    The issue with Frank and bias, as I see it, is that the press downplayed the matter, and it barely hurt the Dems or even Frank for that matter, short term or long term.

    With the Foley incident, it sounds more like they're after Hastert's job than justice. The investigation seems more interested in spreading the blame as far as possible than in seeking true justice. (The family of the page just wants the matter dropped.)

    Now it turns out the IM log may turn out to be a prank gone awry. Don't count on that making any difference to the investigation.

    Anything involving an adult propositioning teens is, of course, the worst part of this current issue as I noted in my first bullet.

    Frank of course had two sins: the sin of commission (getting his boyfriend off the hook on the tickets) and the sin of omission (not blowing the whistle on the prostitution ring run from their apartment). Neither is fitting of any decent person, let alone a Congressman.

    P.S. Thanks for the comment. Nice limerick at the top of your site. I laughed!

     

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