More stuff you should be reading instead of wasting your time reading convention coverage… #

• I had forgotten about the Internet Archive until I stumbled across a reference to it again yesterday. What a marvelous resource – video, audio, text, and web pages all archived and searchable!
• Lawrence Lessig has written an open letter to Bill O’Reilly asking him to stop verbally abusing Jeremy Glick. Glick, whose father was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11, was invited on the show to discuss why he had signed a full page anti-war ad run in national newspapers. On the show, O’Reilly behaved boorishly (you can watch the video of the interview and a clip about the segment from Outfoxed via links from Lessig’s letter). Since the show, O’Reilly has badly mischaracterized Glick’s statements. Thank you for standing up for Mr. Glick, Lawrence. Well said. (via Boing Boing)
• The Bush administration is seeking to remove citizens’ control over health care issues. The New York Times reports that lawyers for the government are arguing in court that “consumers cannot recover damages for [prescription drug and medical device-related injuries if the products have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.” Curious. For a conservative administration, they sure put a lot of faith in Big Government.
• Jay Rosen at PressThink posts his Newsday article today about bloggers at the political conventions. Rosen will be blogging the convention himself, and I think he’s right on target with the difference between bloggers and journalists:

  “Journalists have learned to split themselves off from the public, and talk about it as an “other,” almost a thing with behavior patterns of its own. Bloggers are more embedded with the public, which to them is not so much an “it” as a “we.” #

  Exactly. Bloggers can do what journalists should do: make news stories relevant and meaningful to ordinary Americans. Of course being a blogger doesn’t automatically make you brilliant and incisive, but bloggers who just talk out of their ass will be filtered out, or other bloggers will counter them. Balance in the blogosphere will be more meaningful than that presented in major media. That’s not an assertion I can support, but it is what I believe. #

• By the way, you can catch up with all the convention-related blog postings at ConventionBloggers.com.
• If you’re protesting the convention, you may have to do it inside a cage. I agree with TalkLeft – this stinks on ice.
• In a great Molly Ivins column from this week, Molly feels her head spinning around like that little girl in The Exorcist. (via Sysiphus Shrugged)

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Sunday, July 25th, 2004 @ 11:25 am Nothings
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