New Blog

I'm back, but I've moved!

Check me (and a few friends) out over at the new blog:

Culture. Race. Gender. Politics. Class. Media. www.coffeehousetalks.com

A Hitchhiker's Travels

For the few people that might actually read this, I've quit my job and I will be traveling from the end of the month until mid-August. I expect I will not be posting very frequently, even now, as I get my life in order and pack up everything I own into little boxes. On my trip though, I will be blogging at A Hitchhiker's Travels if you care to see.

But some time in mid June, there should be a detailed post on the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, as I go behind enemy lines. Despite jokes to the contrary, I will not carry matches, a lighter, or a flamethrower. As a future lawyer, arson is not in my best interests. Though I may pay admission with a fake $20 bill if I can.

And in later in the summer: Hitler on Ice, a Viking Funeral and Jews in Space!

The Anything But Courageous Debate

I missed the debate Wednesday night. I'm very happy about that, because my TV still works, and I cannot guarantee it would not have had a large hole in it afterward. So, I wake up the next day to check the politics reddit, just to see what some people are saying, and all of the top ten (12 of the top 15) links were separate complaints about the debate. It was shocking how unified everyone was writing about the horrible lack of substance and stampede of right-wing attack that passed for a debate on ABC. Glenn Greenwald bats leadoff here, as always in dealing with media nonsense:

My favorite (unintentionally revealing) media commentary about the debate is from The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut and Dan Balz, who devoted paragraph after paragraph to describing the substance-free "issues" that consumed most of the debate -- Obama's "remarks about small-town values, questions about his patriotism and the incendiary sermons of his former pastor . . . gaffes, missteps and past statements" -- and, at the end of the article, they added:

The debate also touched on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, taxes, the economy, guns and affirmative action.

It's just not possible to express the wretched state of our establishment press better than that sentence does.

And over at Kos, Hunter presents the idea that this sham of a debate was just as historic as Obama's speech on race, but in a much more sinister sense:

What a contrast. Only a few weeks ago, we were presented with what was considered by many to be a historic speech by a presidential candidate on race in America -- historic for its substance, tone, delivery, and stark candor. Last night, we had an opposing, equally historic example -- and I sincerely mean that, I consider it to be every bit as significant as that word implies -- of the collapse of the political press into self-willed incompetence. You might as well pull any half-intelligent person off the street, and they would unquestionably have more difficult and significant questions for the two candidates. It was not merely a momentarily bad performance, by ABC, it was a debate explicitly designed to be what it was, which is far more telling.

Read the whole thing. I'm tempted to agree. There was such outrage than even Howie Kurtz, media critic extraordinaire, decried it, not just the lefty blogs. Maybe this embarrassment to the profession will be a wake-up call to the traditional media. Maybe they'll start to realize people care, and we can begin the healing process. The cynic is me still doubts.

And for a bigger sampling of the outrage, here's a summary from AMERICABlog.

Musical Mario Car

One of the coolest things I've seen in a while.


http://view.break.com/487616 - Watch more free videos

Man, it takes me a day just to figure this out on piano. Can't imagine the effort that went into this.

Media hatred isn't new.

This is a really interesting post.

But the right wing talk brigade doesn't exist just to build up their own or tear down Democrats. They have, from the moment they first rolled onto the air, existed to tell you that traditional news organizations are no good. The Washington Post? Inside the beltway losers out of touch with real America. CNN? The Clinton News Network. The New York Times? Please. Do you really have to ask?

Punditry has always aimed as much artillery at the people who deliver the news as it does at those who make it. There's a very good reason for this. Before you can convince someone of a lie, you need to make it more difficult for them to check your information. If you establish from the start that NPR is communist, MSNBC and CNN are slanted, and every newspaper this side of Journal's editorial page should be printed on pink paper, then any exaggeration you deliver becomes the de facto standard. Impugning the validity of other news sources is the first job of a successful pundit. They don't seek to be your sources of information by passing along reliable news. They do so by constantly assailing the legitimacy of other sources until you're left shaking your head at the absolute ignorance of everyone but Rush/Bill/Sean/Ann.

...

The myth of the "liberal media" came long before the blogs. Discrediting the "nattering nabobs" of the press is not a game that originated with bloggers. Every blogger I know is fully aware that we could not survive without the legwork done by hardworking, professional reporters. Bloggers are not competition to the traditional media -- though they do, hopefully, act as an occasional check on its excesses. However, even if the Internet were entirely dedicated to the downfall of existing media, it would be only one popgun in a chorus of cannons. A large part of the traditional media is dedicated to nothing less than making war on the rest.

Suffering the wounds from that war, the media might have chosen to hold to strict standards and fought back by dissecting the falsehoods being directed against good reporting. Instead, that job has been left, almost without exception, to the very bloggers Keen blames as the cause. The reaction of the traditional media was quite different.

In response to the assault from less factual sources, media both accelerated the already existing trend toward mingling news and entertainment and -- in the most twisted move imaginable -- sought to imitate the mudslingers. They joined the war not by upholding their standards, but by dismissing them. And again, they did so for the reason that Keen indicates as the break between amateur and professional: the perception that there was more money to be made on the less truthful side of the aisle.

It's a good point, I think, that blogs are not new in that regard. But how do we reestablish that facts are indeed important and reshape the news? Glenn Greenwald, in this interview, suggests mudslinging MAD:

The point isn't to start lowering oneself to that level and copying the worst parts of the Right's behavior. The point is to neutralize what they do so that it's no longer one-sided. If one country possesses nuclear weapons, a rival country wants to obtain them not to use them, but to render their use irrational, impossible. That's what Democrats and liberals must start doing with these election rituals.

Maybe that's the answer. But, as they suggest about Iran, I'm not sure the Right is rational enough for MAD to work as a deterrent. We probably need regulation of what qualifies as press, as I've suggested in the past (last few paragraphs, post-rant).

CNN calls Obama elitist

I just do not know where to start on this one. I once again had the profound misfortune of watching CNN while at the gym. And once again, I came away with anger.

So, here's the deal. Yesterday, at San Francisco fundraiser, Obama said the following:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Daily Kos has the summary of the back and forth between campaigns here. Personally, I don't believe the comments are that big a deal, maybe just a little accidental slippage of the truth. But that's not even what I care about here. CNN, and Kitty Pilgrim in particular, very Seriously, and responsibly, charged into the fray to make sure we understand "Senator Obama's political attack on small-town America". She wanted to make sure we knew about the "outrage" at the "stunning comments". CNN wanted to make sure we judged for ourselves the last to last night's poll: "Do you believe that Senator Barack Obama's comments reveal his elitist attitude toward every hard working American?" Just like Fox News, that poll question is exceedingly fair and balanced, isn't it?

At points during the program, Pilgrim asks several correspondents for reactions, and they seem to be trying to offer the idea that it's not nearly as condemning a moment as she wanted.

PILGRIM: Words are being parsed very, very carefully. This is quite a statement. Errol, your thoughts on this?

ERROL LOUIS, "NEW YORK DAILY NEWS": I think this is a problem Barack Obama should have anticipated and could have easily avoided which is he's walking on a tight rope every time he goes and speaks. Every place I've seen him campaign, in every state, he does something that politicians don't usually do, which is to ask people to be better than they are.

And to sort of delve into it and to say for this nation to work we all have to be better, we have to be more understanding, we have to be more generous, we have to be a little less narrow minded. It's very different from what politicians normally do.

And Roland Martin:

Wow. Politically dumb because he actually told the truth. At some point we have to accept the reality that there are people in America now who are angry and are bitter. And we do blame other folks for certain things.

Basically, Kitty Pilgrim and her producers were trying to shove the storyline that this was a huge gaffe down the throats of their correspondents and viewers, with phrses like the "very important controversy". Instead, you see them call her out. Here's another exchange: Pilgrim says she'll put the remark up, but then she puts Obama's response statement, and Clinton's remarks, never actually showing what Obama said. After:

PILGRIM: What strikes me about that remark, Roland, is that Senator Clinton is using this as an occasion to talk about being presidential. Did Senator Obama do himself a disservice in this remark in not coming up with a solution in siding with the problem instead of the solution?

MARTIN: Well, first of all, we don't have -- do we have the full tape of what he said after that, as well? Or do we just have that?

Even Roland Martin on the show was trying to get her to be a little fairer, just in case, maybe the remarks are being distorted a bit. The good news is that while Pilgrim was stuffing the anti-Obama spin down our throats, CNN correspondents fought back on both her show and on the Situation Room, surprisingly enough.

I hate CNN, but maybe, just maybe, there's a small chance it won't be too bad this time despite the MSM trying it damnedest.

UPDATE: It gets so much better. I honestly can't remember the last thing Hillary attacked on that she didn't also do or that Bill didn't do in his 1992 campaign. It's hilarious.

Eminent Domain for Intellectual Property?

So, I've now seen two weird cases in the news that seem like patents are infringing on the public good.

Voting machines:

A Sequoia executive, Edwin Smith, put Union County Clerk Joanne Rajoppi on notice that an independent analysis would violate the licensing agreement between his firm and the county. In a terse two-page letter Smith also argued the voting machine software is a Sequoia trade secret and cannot be handed over to any third party.

Stray satellite:

In the face of unrelated legal battles between the current patent owner Boeing and the satellite's owner SES Americom - any efforts to salvage AMC-14 have been cast aside.

Primarily this is because SES is currently suing Boeing for an unrelated New Skies matter in the order of $50 million dollars - and Boeing told SES that the patent was only available if SES Americom dropped the lawsuit.

Doesn't this seem wrong? Isn't intellectual property subject to eminent domain? SCOTUS said so back in 1912. Voting transparency is fundamental to our society, so I feel eminent domain definitely applies in the first case. It's a tougher argument for a privately owned satellite, but space research has been said to be good for advancement of mankind before, so maybe it applies. More likely to apply is a principle in tort law where if one party has a minor inconvenience in order to solve the entire dispute, they are made to swallow it. I feel $50 mil is a minor inconvenience compared to a likely multi-billion dollar satellite. Then again, I don't know for sure.

Fox News Documentary

I wasn't going to say anything more about Fox News specifically, because most people know how absurd it is, and I've long since given up. But this, from the Daily Show last night, is just hilarious and says it all.

Bill can also lie to be a loyal husband.

I thought he was supposed to be a master politician. The polls were just starting to turn back slightly in Hillary's favor, implying that the damage from Tusla was starting to wear off. So why, Bill, do you bring it up again? And that you manage to lie 4 times in about a minute doing so is not only poor ethics, but poor strategy at this point, no?

UPDATE: Whoops, 8 times total.

Slot Machines vs. Voting Machines

Tables are usually good for getting a point across. A greater point that this illustrates is that it is not the concept of e-voting that is the problem, merely the implementation - the lack of any oversight or security. Like everything else in society, moving towards computers in inevitable, really - we just have to work on making it incorruptible.