Rights? What rights?

• Local Seattle guy Ian Spiers has a harrowing story about being harassed by Homeland Security while taking pictures at a local landmark. Is this what we’ve become – a nation that harasses and intimidates its own citizens? I’m all for greater vigilance and greater security, but can’t those goals be accomplished with compassion, respect, and humility? What are we about, otherwise?
• Holden at Eschaton posts a snippet about a couple that got got arrested for trespassing while wearing anti-Bush t-shirts. This seems to be part of a continuing campaign to regulate what people can say near the President. The full article has more.
• Even Tony Blair, one of America’s staunchest supporters, is urging the US to close the prison camp at Guantanamo. Steps are being taken towards due process, but why did we – we, the United States, the land of the free and home of the brave – think this was a good idea in the first place? (via Eschaton, Reason)
• Ars Technica rips on the Induce Act, which purports to knock down P2P software providers, but could also make innovations like the VCR and CD-burner illegal.
• This makes my stomach hurt – and not in a good way: Sid the Fish finds this poll in the Chicago Tribune that indicates a significant minority of Americans would be okay with losing their right to free speech.

  Politics

• As also noted by Holden at Eschaton, the body count is up to 878 dead Americans in Iraq and 120 dead coalition forces.
• Adam Felber of Fanatical Apathy imagines a conversation with Kevin Kellems
• The Poor Man counts down the lies like Casey Kasem counts down the hits. Er… only in reverse.
• Another take on Michael Moore. (via Atrios)
• House Majority Leader Tom DeLay could be in deep doodoo
• Best anti-Bush Campaign Slogan: Beat Him By More in 2004! (via Brad DeLong)
• A report in The National Review tells us we don’t have too much longer to wait before we see Osama. Boy, if we could get him to rappel from the roof onto the stage at the RNC… Dubya could tackle him and give him noogies until the Secret Service showed up… man that’d be something!

  For Fun

• Discover Channel’s Geek gods “Mythbusters” blow up a plane in the name of science.
• If you’ve got a broadband connection, take a look at this stop-motion Lego Spiderman 2 short. (via Boing Boing)

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

Abuse scandals

• Why is German television doing the US media’s job for them? Sadly, No! prints the nauseating story of underage prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib. (via Eschaton)
• Call me weak, but I can’t help admitting to a certain amount of schadenfreude when I read this BBC News article about the Portland Catholic diocese that plans to declare bankruptcy because of all the money it has paid out settling sex abuse lawsuits. The Catholic prohibition on priests having sex has failed miserably because Prohibition Never Works. Whatever human urge or desire you try to suppress will ultimately end up reconstituting itself with a vengeance.

  Politics

• Wanna know what kind of trial lawyer our new VP candidate was? Read this post by Atrios. I don’t think Kerry could’ve made a better pick.
• David Corn has more on the current VP’s double-talk, which I posted about yesterday. Corn also writs an eloquent column on values and politics for TomPaine.com.
• The administration – get this – investigates itself and finds that it did nothing wrong. Oh! Stop! My sides are splitting! (via Reason Hit & Run)
• EFF reports on the California court ruling that voting machines must have paper trails.
• Michael Moore has a blog! One thing: where’s the RSS feed? People, don’t do this to me. Don’t make me actually check your website 10 times a day to see if you’ve posted. We’re in the XML age now. RSS is where it’s at. Seriously.

  Other

• Wikipedia – the online encyclopedia – posted its 300,000th article. The Wikipedia is written, edited, and maintained in open-source fashion by the same community that uses it as a reference. (via Slashdot)
• Interesting discussion going on over at Brad DeLong’s Webjournal about whether the American Revolution was a good thing or not. I think DeLong is wrong that slavery would have ended more quickly if the Revolutionary War hadn’t happened. Britain took an abolitionist stance only when they determined they had enough slaves to work the Caribbean plantations and they knew that pressing France to abolish the slave trade would give Britain a competitive advantage. However, that’s just my read. The comments to DeLong’s post have some more stimulating speculations.

WTF? The commission investigating the 9/11 attacks comes out publicly and says that Dick Cheney is full of it when he tries to insist that there were ties between al Qaeda and Saddam.

“The Sept. 11 commission, which reported no evidence of collaborative links between Iraq and al Qaeda, said on Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney had no more information than commission investigators to support his later assertions to the contrary.”

Is the Vice President upset at this public upbraiding? Apparently not…

“Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems denied any conflict between the commission’s finding of no Saddam/al Qaeda relationship and the vice president’s position. He described Cheney as being “pleased” about the commission’s statement and said the message “put to rest a non-story.

“As we have said all along, the administration provided the commission with unprecedented access to sensitive information so they could perform their mission,” said Kellems, who noted that the commission’s report was a draft.

“We look forward to reading the commission’s final report,” he added.

A non-story?! You bet your sweet bippy it was a story.

On June 18th, 2004, AP reported:

“Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and he said media reports suggesting that the 9/11 commission has reached a contradictory conclusion were “irresponsible.”

“There clearly was a relationship. It’s been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming,” Cheney said in an interview with CNBC’s “Capitol Report.”

“It goes back to the early ‘90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials.”

“The press, with all due respect, (is) often times lazy, often times simply reports what somebody else in the press said without doing their homework.”

On June 14th, 2004, CNN.com reported:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that Saddam Hussein had “long-established ties” with al Qaeda, an assertion that has been repeatedly challenged by some policy experts and lawmakers.

The vice president offered no details backing up his claim of a link between Saddam and al Qaida.

“He was a patron of terrorism,” Cheney said of Hussein during a speech before The James Madison Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Florida. “He had long established ties with al Qaeda.”

Not to mention the report by CNN.com on June 15th that President Bush still insisted there was a link

A non-story, my ass!

How come I have to find this out from Fafblog? MSNBC – Endangered Species Act trimmed back

So it turns out that yesterday while everyone was out grilling bugers and watchin’ fireworks and listening to their elderly relatives complain about “Oh Giblets my catheter bag is soooo heavy and painful” George W Bush went and gutted the Endangered Species Act by changing a ton of rules through which it’s enforced. Which is funny, ‘cause Giblets woulda thought he’d have done it on a day when people would pay attention, like Earth Day, when the president visited wetlands to talk about his environmental record. Giblets thinks a nice little announcement for this latest initiative might have involved the president shooting a condor in the head in the Rose Garden. This is why Giblets needs to be on Bush’s media team.

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

Elections

• It’s Edwards! John Kerry has chosen John Edwards as his running mate, a fine choice, IMHO. Of course, the attack dogs wasted no time in biting his hiney. Reason’s Hit & Run shows us where to find the Republican National Committee’s Edwards fact page. You’ll hear many of these talking points on Fox, so read News Hounds and fight the FUD. You gotta hand it to the Republicans – they’re way organized and convinced that the truth doesn’t matter, which gives them a decided tactical advantage.
• Local gal Rebecca Harris has been all over electronic voting booths like a dog on a bone. Slashdot mentions this Seattle P-I article which runs down Harris’s determination to expose weaknesses in electronic voting methods. Harris’s website is Black Box Voting.

  Iraq

• Tony Blair lies like a three-year-old. (World Press Review) “We know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction but we know we haven’t found them.” Uh-huh. This whole thing strikes me as about as plausible as Colonel Hogan running a network of underground tunnels out of a German POW camp. It’s like a sitcom, only nobody’s laughing.
• Kevin Drum is scared as hell over the mess the Pentagon is making of the war.
• Meanwhile, Sid the Fish laments that we just don’t seem to get why killing Iraqis hasn’t made them love us.

  Politics

• A couple from David Corn: First, Corn shoots holes in Ashcroft’s latest terror threat warning. Second, he extends Michael Moore’s notation of ties between Bush, the Saudis, and The Carlyle Group.
• SiliconValley.com’s Dan Gilmour surveys the state of American Liberty (via BoingBoing)
• Orrin Hatch is both evil and non-evil. Evil: Hatch is pushing the Induce Act, which seeks to redefine copyright and stifle innovation. (MacCentral) Non-evil: Hatch is also supporting easing the restrictions on stem cell research. (Wired News) Don’t know what to make of this. I report, you decide.
• Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman is just a dumbass. (Eschaton)

  Media Bias

• For what it’s worth: My fiancée and I got into a discussion about liberal bias in the media, and here are a few websites I found when I decided to research the matter: Journalism.org’s The Last Lap was mentioned in Al Franken’s book and is the only report I could find that described its methodology. (It doesn’t study media bias per se, but rather “tone” of coverage for Bush and Gore in the 2000 campaign.) An essay at Steve Kanga’s Liberalism Resurgent site purports to bust the myth of bias. (Kanga, obviously, has a stated liberal bias.) FAIR, a progressive media watchdog, examines the liberal media claim and concludes that while journalists tend to be more liberal than most Americans on social issues, they tend to be more conservative on issues such as economics and trade. Furthermore, FAIR notes, most major media outlets are owned and staffed at the highest levels by conservatives, and conservative think-tanks are quoted more often by mainstream journalists. Finally, the ultra-conservative Media Research Center concludes, unsurprisingly, that there sure is a liberal bias in the media.

  Tech

• Design magazine I.D. has awarded Apple with a design distinction for its work. (MacNN News) As an iPod owner, I can testify. The packaging is unique and inventive, and it put me in a good mood before I even got my hands on my new toy.

  Consumer News

• Slashdot merely confirms our hatred of Best Buy. From a chronic lack of staff on the sales floor to shelves devoid of price information, Best Buy has consistently demonstrated their complete lack of commitment to customer service, and now they’re apparently prepared to declare war on consumers. When I used to buy CDs, I’d buy them at Best Buy, since I knew they were a loss leader. This latest news calls for more drastic action. From now on, Stumax.com-istan refuses to acknowledge the existence of the company known as Best Buy. Gifts claiming to come from the company will be returned, and the store will be removed from our comparison shopping route. You want war? You got it!

Iraq is an autonomous state now, right? We handed the keys back to them a couple of days early… right? So how can we still be launching air strikes? Was the air strike sanctioned by the Iraqi government? Was there an agreement with the CAP at handover that US forces would continue to operate as before? In other words, what’s the official Iraqi stance on these military actions?

We went to see Around the World in 80 Days last night. Though there were plenty of laugh lines and Jackie Chan is always just a joy to watch onscreen, the movie overall was disappointing. I’d recommend it for a rental.

Now, here are the things you should be reading today instead of setting off the last few firecrackers in your arsenal…

• How do you compete against free software? That’s the question they’re asking themselves at Microsoft these days, and the answer is: spread the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). They’d better start shoveling it a bit faster, because Paris City Hall may be the latest government entity to move to open source software. (via Gadgetopia) Redmond is cutting prices, but the tide may be turning against them. May I humbly suggest another strategy to Gates et al for preserving your market share? Make better software!!
• Fallout from Fahrenheit 9/11 continues to… er… fall out. Kevin Drum nails it, I think, when he calls the movie a “Rorschach test: you see in it primarily a reflection of yourself.” He quotes Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy, who is in turn responding to this piece by David Kopel enumerating “Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 911.” I’ve read a bit of the Kopel piece and it seems to be splitting hairs pretty fine (cf Deceit #5, in which I can’t really find the deception.) Though I think there are some quite valid points made in the article, this grasping by Moore’s critics seems to be pretty telling. If nothing else, the debate engendered by Moore’s movie is a healthy antidote to the poisoned rhetoric we’ve been swallowing lately.
• Hey, Kopel! You wanna know how to do this stuff the right way? See The Poor Man expose a Presidential whopper, a SecDef con, a POTUS flip-flop, and a WMD disinformation campaign. I’m starting to think “The Poor Man” is, like, some kind of ironic blog name.
• Food for thought from The Nation’s Editor’s Cut.
• I wish there were more being said about the Bush administration’s crackdown on dissent as noted in this post by Tena at Eschaton. This is not the first instance of this, nor the most egregious. I’m really hoping, though, that instances of Bush stifling legitimate protest, establishing so-called “free speech zones” and so on do become a campaign issue. I think voters should stand up and be counted if they want to align themselves with anti-Constitutional police behavior.
• Brad DeLong spotlights Winning Argument, a new blog that purports to give anti-Bush forces sources for their talking points. It’s a great idea, though you might want to poke carefully through some of these.

• This is really disturbing. Tena at Eschaton points us to a Guardian article that asks where did all the Iraqi reconstruction money go?

Stuff about freedom, hope, and independence that you should be reading instead of setting off those illegal fireworks.

• If you’ve never read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, what better day could there be than July 4th? The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has a really nice web page from which you can access scads of information about America’s founding documents. You can see images of the originals, download text transcriptions, and read essays on the impact of the charters. These inspirational documents are essential to understanding what it means to be American.
• Via Atrios – Read this now: Give us back our damn flag. Liberals and progressives of the past have been responsible for much of the patriotic rhetoric we cling to in the present, including the Pledge of Allegiance and the poem on the Statue of Liberty. This article argues that it’s time for today’s liberals and progressives to reclaim their love of flag and country.
• In a similar vein, The Nation’s David Nichols, invoking Tom Paine, calls true patriots to arms, as does Former Republican Pete McCloskey (Sid’s Fishbowl)
• Brad DeLong also reminds us of the revolutionary writings of Thomas Paine and offers a few suggestions for the F9/11 Director’s Cut.
• F9/11’s director Michael Moore has a sensible view on file sharing. (Slashdot) Seems to me that most artists do and most executives don’t, defining “sensible view” here as one that upholds standards of fair use.
• Also via Slashdot and also on the topic of file sharing, that most excellent of bands They Might Be Giants has announced a new TMBG music store. At 99 cents per song and $9.99 per album, the store’s prices are comparable with Apple’s iTunes Music Store, yet the mp3 quality is higher, there are no DRM restrictions, and the money goes directly to the artists. I bought the two available albums to support the band and the concept. I’m still parsing the Terms of Use page, but this looks like exactly what I’ve been waiting for – a way to pay my money directly to the artists while receiving music in a format that trusts me to be responsible with it. The way CDs, tapes and vinyl used to be. The site also has a flash app available for download that will stream TMBG songs to your computer. Wicked cool.
• BBC News reports on the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the Freedom Tower, the new building which will take the place of the World Trade Center.
• The Poor Man keeps exposing the lies.
• Orcinus is selling Bush/Cheney t-shirts. Love it. (via Sid’s Fishbowl.)

• Finally, in God Sheds His Grace, Adam Felber gapes in awe at how the Founding Fathers ever got a Declaration through the vetting process: “Ponytailed dreamers might feel that certain truths are “self-evident,” and the rabble might find such pithy phrasing inspirational, but nowadays we know better. The truth that hot coffee might burn you isn’t self evident, fergodsakes, so how can any reasonable person expect the so-called inalienable rights of man to slide by with a simple “because we say so?” The fact that the Declaration of Independence was issued with no caveats, waivers, or warning labels strikes the modern reader as not only silly but very, very irresponsible.”

The (soon-to-be) wife and I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight. It was a 10:30 showing on a Friday night in Seattle on a holiday weekend. The movie was running in two theaters. The 10:00 showing had been sold out, and our theatre of about 200 seats was full, mostly of 20-somethings. Now, we were at a theatre in downtown Seattle, a city which I would suspect tends to be a little more politically aware than some others, but I was still heartily encouraged to see a full house of young folks attending a movie like this.

The movie is very effective, and raises more than a few compelling issues. Perhaps the most impactful images of the film were of wounded, dead, and dying American soldiers, and of the grief experienced by the mother of a soldier killed in action. It seems to me that we have seen very few images of soldiers in Iraq at all, much less images like these. The realization of just what kind of media manipulation and media complicity has been involved in hypnotizing Americans into thinking we’re not even really fighting a war hit me like an RPG. I am sick to my gut with the cynical way this war has been prosecuted by the administration.

The film has its flaws. Spinsanity lists some errors, though I take issue with the tone of the piece and disagree with some of their interpretations. The important thing is that , flaws aside, Moore is finally giving us an alternative lens through which to view the last two years. If he sometimes uses innuendo and insinuation to get his point across, I, for one, can forgive him. Moore is a filmmaker and the language of film often eschews the verbal and explicit in favor of drawing connections in the viewer’s mind. Innuendo and insinuation are Moore’s province and right as an artist, as long as he shows us the essential truth. (Digby makes my point here.) Innuendo and insinuation are not the right of the politician, though, and Fahrenheit 9/11 shows us exactly why we must never again allow our country’s public servants to use these weapons against us. We must demand truth and accountability.

Lots of folks have weighed in on the film. This post from The Talent Show sums it up as well as any – “In the end, regardless of which side of the aisle you sit on, this movie should provide something to piss you off and make you cry. Considering how crucial this upcoming election is, that’s exactly what moviegoers need right now. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re missing out on one of the most rewarding moviegoing experiences that’s come along in a long while.” Fahrenheit 9/11 does its job by puncturing the antiseptic bubble of rhetoric that we have been sealed in for the last couple of years. Guess what? An alternate viewpoint isn’t going to kill us. It might just make us stronger.

Michael Moore’s website addresses some of the criticisms of the film, and publishes some of the reactions from around the world, like that of Canadian writer Bill Doskoch of CTV.ca, who ends his column with the following

I’ll leave you with a snippet of an interview of Morgan Spurlock, director and star of the fast food documentary Super Size Me, with Salon.com:

Salon: With the success of Michael Moore’s films and others, it seems like there is a growing trend of left-leaning, progressive, anti-corporate documentaries. Why is that?

Spurlock: I think that documentary is your last bastion for any truth today. It’s the one place where you have no media conglomerate telling you what to say, the one place where people aren’t going to put a vice on opinion and on fact. You can put something out that takes a stand and says, ‘Listen, you need to know this.’

Right on. Keep talking, Brother Michael

More stuff you should be reading instead of downloading porn…

Politics

• If true, this report of Abu Ghraib-like prison abuse in the US is horrifying. (via Reason)
• David Corn has an article on some unsung American Heroes we should be honoring this weekend.
• The Poor Man previews the new Bush ad, John Kerry’s Coalition of the Shrilling. Fun-NEE.
• Kevin Drum cries for the CIA. Those poor spies… always getting left out in the cold.
• Professor Lawrence Tribe looks at the meaning of the Supreme Court’s decisions on executive power. (via SCOTUSBlog)
• Shoulda known. Remember that image of Iraqis toppling Sadaam’s statue? That iconic image, that symbol of Iraq’s liberation and how happy the Iraqis were that Sadaam was gone? Turns out it was staged by our Army’s psy-ops. Atrios quotes the LA Times article, and we get a more detailed view – with pictures! from Sid’s Fishbowl.
• Atrios also he points us to this Crossfire exchange in which Bob Novak squirms in his own juices and to Rumsfeld’s latest baldfaced lie
• Brad DeLong $#@!s-up the administration. Also, DeLong quotes some talking points on Farenheit 9/11 that won’t be on TV.

• Orcinus notes the continuing work by the AWOL Project to ferret the truth out of Bush’s TXANG records.

  Culture

• Brilliant lunatic Marlon Brando dead at 80. The Columbia Union points us to a suitable tribute. Reason’s Hit & Run has some comments and a list of movies to watch in tribute.
• This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, a blog with a name that’s WAY too long, notes that the he-men of Old Hollywood action films are being replaced by sensitive guys like Toby Maguire, he of the new Spiderman 2.

• Creative Commons has a new Wiki dedicated to cataloging open and non-open content on the web.

  Science & Tech

• The Hubble Space Telescope has quite possibly discovered a hundred new planets. (via Slashdot)
• See the latest images from Saturn at the Cassini-Huygens home page.
• Boing Boing shows us an intriguing story about researchers who have come up with an algorithm that can detect Photoshopped images.
• Boing Boing also had an item about Sony’s Librie e-book reader, which I had previously noted with some interest in this blog. The downside of this marvelous technology, it seems, is that Sony has bundled it with a viciously restrictive Digital Rights Management scheme that makes your purchased e-books self-destruct in 60 days. Why in the world would Sony think consumers would accept this?

• This iPod mini wedding cake is just silly. My own wedding is coming up in a couple of months, and no way would I approve an iPod cake. A Treo 600 cake, though…