More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Wow. Here’s a partial transcript of an interview Ted Koppel did with Jon Stewart, who explains why people are turned off of Big Media. (Also discussion here)
• A sort-of-related post about journalists over at Hullabaloo, where Digby points out some institutional flaws.
• Good friggin’ point over at TalkLeft. Why are we keeping Kobe Bryant’s accuser’s name a secret but not Kobe Bryant’s?
• I mentioned Michael Moore’s speech at Cambridge a couple of days ago. There’s streaming video of it at C-SPAN. (via Seeing The Forest)
• Is the Bush/Cheney campaign racially profiling journalists? The Arizona Daily Star suspects that may be the case, based on what happened to one of their photographers. (via Eschaton)
• James Carville makes me laugh. See this quote at Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal.
• Via Sid’s Fishbowl, check out get your war on, a brutally funny political comic strip. Also, Sid finds us a timeline comparing the lives of Bush and Kerry

It’s been a busy morning. Here, finally, is more stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Sandy Berger is cleared of all charges. (Eschaton) Think we’ll see any retractions? (Hullabaloo)
• Wanna see Dick Cheney speak? Sign a loyalty oath. (ABQ Journal)
• Hayseeds Unite! You have nothing to lose but your… hay. Seeing the Forest has a defense of convention bloggers.
• Sid’s Fishbowl is going back through the record to see just how Kerry’s and Bush’s respective histories of accomplishment stack up.
• The Red Ferret Journal is working on a Wiki of links to a million free & legal music tracks.
• Digby and Ron Reagan note a quiet resolution amongst Republicans not to vote for George W. Bush.
• Will Ferrell is a funny human, and this piece he recorded for ACT is a stitch. (via Sid’s Fishbowl)

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Seventy people were killed by a car bomb in Iraq yesterday.
• Juan Cole says the Bush Administration is exaggerating the threat from al Qaeda yet utterly failing to do anything to counter the threat that exists.
• The transcript of a Michael Moore speech given a couple of days ago in Cambridge is up at AlterNet. It’s a bit long, but it’s jam-packed with good, patriotic sentiments. Worth a read. (via Seeing the Forest)
• Using a special type of Magnetic Resonance Imaging which lets them watch the brain in action, scientists have discovered autism’s biological roots: a brain which refuses to coordinate functions. The discovery has led to a new theory of autism and suggests new ways for treating the disorder. (Science Blog)
• Adam Felber notes the media’s shock that the Convention is actually interesting!
• The Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal is continually stimulating. Today’s post asks, “How would media coverage be different if convention handlers didn’t try to manage expectations?” The idea being that if the DNC says they are going to spread a positive message, the press will look for instances of negative messages. If the DNC says they’re going to spread a negative image, the press will look for the positive points. If nobody said anything about their expectations for the convention, the press would have to make up its own mind. Interesting thoughts. (Also, see Sven’s comments about John Stewart on Nightline. Wish I’d caught that interview.)
• Via Seeing the Forest, here’s another way to see the latest Convention postings.
• Brilliant! Billmon posts I, Robot-inspired laws of Republicanism.
• We note with respect the passing of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA structure. It’s impossible to imagine what our world would be like today without this singular achievement.
• Thanks to Arianna Huffington for reminding me about this chestnut from the Al Sharpton speech:

  “We were told that we were going to Iraq because there were weapons of mass destruction. We’ve lost hundreds of soldiers. We’ve spent $200 billion dollars at a time when we had record state deficits. And when it became clear that there were no weapons, they changed the premise for the war and said: No, we went because of other reasons.

  If I told you tonight, Let’s leave the Fleet Center, we’re in danger, and when you get outside, you ask me, Reverend Al, What is the danger? and I say, It don’t matter. We just needed some fresh air, I have misled you and we were misled.”

Damn. I just caught Barack Obama’s speech from yesterday (you can watch it here Windows Real Media seems to be a more reliable feed). I teared up. Seriously. Let’s hope this guy is the future of the Democratic party, ‘cause he’s damn good.

First black President? Mmmmm…. maybe…

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Don’t forget to check out ConventionBloggers for the latest posts from the… uh… Convention. Also, the offical site of the Democratic National Convention has links to speeches and schedules. Or, you could just read Fafblog.
• Hear that whooshing sound? That was your privacy jetting out of the country. Ars Technica reports that a judge has decided that when you give your personal information to some websites, that information is not protected even if there’s a privacy statement in force on the site. If someone can explain that one to me, I’d really appreciate it.
• Sisyphus Shrugged clues us in to the fact that Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) is pulling out of Afghanistan because of security concerns. As SS says, this doesn’t support the Administration’s assertions that America’s actions have made the world safer.
• You can make fun of Barbie. Yay! (via Corante)
• I think Digby’s got the right take on Howard Dean... “I truly believe that if Howard Dean can be persuaded to take over the chairmanship of the Democratic Party he could change everything. He is really a wholesale politician and as such can actually make the party be more responsive to the grassroots, but even more importantly in my book, he can begin the necessary liberal education project that can change the way this country thinks about politics.”
• The US government is distributing huge wads of cash in Iraq. (Eschaton) As Holden says, “I’m sure that none of that easy cash winds up in the black market or in the hands of the insurgents our men and women are fighting, aren’t you?”
• Speaking of Iraq, Juan Cole calls Cheney a liar, and backs it up. (via Sid’s Fishbowl)
• Whew. Brad DeLong assures us that we’ll still be able to bang our heads against the wall when the Democrats win.
• The Talent Show shows off a bunch of Bush-Fall-Down-and-Go-Boom photos.
• As a former Disnoid, I love this. MiceAge slings gossip from deep inside the bowels of the Happiest Place on Earth. Check out “Michael Goes to Disneyland.” (via Boing Boing)
• Scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center have discovered that the body’s natural reaction to a spinal cord injury can actually exacerbate the effects of the damage. The discovery suggests that early treatment – within hours of the injury – could dramatically improve recovery. (Science Blog)
• See the Forest has a some good posts from and about the Convention. One really good point was that next week will be the week to really read and study the blogs, after the bloggers have had a chance to rest, recuperate, and read their notes. I have a sense that this is true, and this points up—again—the difference between bloggers and the mainstream press: bloggers can afford to think consider and revisit issues in their own time, where journalists are under intense pressure to meet arbitrary deadlines. (There’s a related post at Matthew Yglesias’ blog; scroll down a bit to Bruce Webb’s comment.)

  The other interesting read was the notes about Michael Moore’s talk at the Campaign For America’s Future event. I can understand why Moore rubs people the wrong way, and I don’t always like his methods, but he’s got a huge heart and a passion for making the country a better place to live. For that, I’ll keep buying his books and watching his films.

• JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, is apparently chilled to learn Harry’s half-blood status has Nazi parallels. The parallels struck the popular author during a visit to a Holocaust museum. I’m surprised that it was a shock to her, but whatever. On a related notse, Rowling’s official site is a really slick Flash site worth checking out.

This is mystifying on many levels: so… and stick with me for a second here… Bush makes a speech earlier in the month about how Castro’s government encourages prostitution. And Castro makes a fiery speech denying the charges and denouncing Bush. The MSNBC article about the flap reports all this and analyzes Castro’s attack on Bush’s mental health and whether Bush’s Cuba policy is slanted to activate the Republican base in Florida.

But… here’s the kicker… the MSNBC article devotes precisely one brief paragraph to the most bizarre and howlingly embarrassing detail of the whole incident:

Three days after Bush’s remarks, the Los Angeles Times reported that the White House found the comments in a Dartmouth undergraduate paper posted on the Internet and lifted them out of context. “It shows they didn’t read much of the article,” commented Charlie Trumbull, the author.

Did you get that?! Bush’s speechwriters plagarized an undergraduate essay that they lifted from the Internet and that they apparently didn’t even bother to fully read. And MSNBC devotes a paragraph to it.

Fortunately, the LA Times did cover the real story. The White House response?

On Monday, administration officials acknowledged that they did not have a source for the wording of the president’s citation other than Trumbull’s paper. A White House spokeswoman defended the inclusion, arguing it expressed an essential truth about Cuba.

Well, there you go. As long as something expresses an essential truth, it really doesn’t matter if the source is factual or accurate. Aren’t they the least bit embarrassed? I mean, they’re the White House, for godssake. Don’t they have access to actual information?

Maybe it’s hard. You know? Maybe, when you’ve been caught in as many embarrassing lies and distortions as this administration has, maybe it’s just hard to be embarrassed anymore. It’s like when you’re so behind with cleaning your house that you start accepting the mess as a virtue. You just pile more crap anywhere and say, “it’s my house and I can live however I want.”

Aaaaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

That is all.

(via Boing Boing)

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Please… if you don’t read anything else, read A Short History of 21st Century Iraq. This article by Stephen Soldz pieces together the jigsaw of mismanagement, hypocrisy, and brutal stupidity that has marked America’s campaign in that country. (via Eschaton)
• If, like me, you missed Bill Clinton’s speech last night, you can read it here. It’s pretty damn good.
• Arianna Huffington lets us know that Big Media Faces couldn’t find their balls if they were interviewing them. Ah, well. At least some anchors aren’t paralyzed by objectivity. (via The National Debate)
• Though Kevin Drum equivocates a bit on whether or not the networks should cover the conventions in depth, I think he’s right on to be “swayed by the argument that that’s the whole point: they are long commercials for the candidates, and once every four years the networks ought to suck it up and let the candidates make their pitch to us raw and unedited.”
• Funny Flash movie at ACLU about ordering a pizza in a privacy-free society (via Boing Boing)
• Damn. That JFK sure spoke some great speeches. (Sid’s Fishbowl) What I’m consistently struck by whenever I encounter Kennedy’s speeches – and, I suspect, it’s part of the reason why he remains such an icon today – is how he managed to focus everyone’s eyes in the same direction. He would gather threads of the past and present and knot them into a rope and sling it – with virtuosic verbal alacrity – across the chasm of the future and say, “There! That’s where we’re going.” And you just—even today, I find myself nodding and saying, “Yes, he’s right, let’s go there.” Clinton also has undeniable speaking ability, but his speeches are more evocative than forward-pointing.
• Just want to give a shout out to Talking Points Memo for a second. I gave Josh a teensy bit of scratch to help him cover the convention, and I’m liking what I see so far. I’m looking forward to seeing the results of some of his interviews.

Okay, I didn’t get blogging credentials for the Convention, but I figured I’d turn on C-SPAN and do a little Tele-Blogging. Only one thought occurs to me, though, as I watch the coverage:

Four more days of this!? Criminies.

More to come…

More stuff you should be reading instead of rules for the Democratic National Convention Drinking Game...

• A short and to the point opinion on why racial profiling doesn’t work. (via Brown Equals Terrorist)
• Boing Boing reports that 30,000 anti-Induce Act letters have been sent to Congress so far. Think it’ll make a difference?
• As Professor DeLong says, they’re tax shifts, not tax cuts. This Bethesda, MD, pub owner is finding that out the hard way. (Eschaton)
• Josh Marshall notes that MSNBC has adopted the blogging model in a big way. This seems like a classic competitive threat response to me. Right now there’s a clear division between the mainstream press and the bloggers. The mainstream may be seeking to remove the threat from the rise of bloggers by blurring the line. This means, a) the press acknowledges there’s a weakness with their model; b) they’re scared by the threat that bloggers pose; c) we’re likely to see a brand new model of the press within the next 5 – 10 years. (For comparison, think of AT&T after regulation. The rise of competitors like MCI and Sprint forced AT&T to lower prices and offer more features, to the point that AT&T has given up on pursuing its residential business.)

  For what it’s worth, I don’t think much of what MSNBC is trying to do. The problems with mainstream media are systemic, and I don’t think they’re going to change just because a few media sites start blogs. The Hardball blog is currently filled mostly with emails from viewers… not the kind of content that’s likely to make me come back for more. I don’t think blogging is the be-all and end-all, but I do think it has its strengths. Bloggers have a head start in thinking about new ways to parse and ponder the events of the day, and they are developing an understanding of what it takes to be successful in the blogosphere. A mainstream media dependent on audiences in the tens- and hundreds-of-thousands is not likely to understand the economics or dynamics of blogging to a more narrow field.

• I don’t think this is a world-changing development, either, but it sure is interesting. Functional Ambivalent gives us the story of a dissatisfied Republican who’s trying to wrest the nomination from Bush.
• The number of people in jail in the U.S. – 6.9 million! – is at an all-time high. (TalkLeft)

I saw a version of the following on MrBarrett.com and got to wondering if it was a real quote. The incredible Snopes verified its veracity.

From Gustav Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diary:

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” [Hermann] Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”