“THERE IS A THREAT. YOU NEED TO ACT.” Here’s a post from RedState on how to comment (you can do it by email) on the FEC’s proposal to regulate bloggers. [Relocated to keep this at the top a while longer.]
UPDATE: I should stress just how bipartisan and broad-based the blogospheric resistance is.
AIDS AND INDIA: An interesting grassroots Internet journalism project, organized by Sandeep Junnarkar.
PHOTO-FOALBLOGGING: Here’s my sister’s new foal, a lovely female who is, as of yet, un-named. She was born last night without incident, much to my sister’s relief.
MARK TAPSCOTT says that some media folks still don’t get it, and probably never will.
It’s worth reading his piece together with this one on Newsweek by Jay Rosen, though Jay posted before the latest Newsweek flap.
UPDATE: And it’s especially worth reading this Mark Steyn column. Also, don’t miss Ernest Miller’s take.
And, while not directly related, this column by Keith Thompson is relevant, and is also a must-read.
And doesn’t this item say it all? (Via Kaus). More here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reacting to the latest Newsweek story, reader C.J. Burch emails:
The media machine is turning out debacles so quickly that it’s hard to react to them all. Maybe that’s their strategy. Simply overwhelm the rest of us with the sheer scope of their bias, dishonesty and incompetence.
That’s so crazy it just might work!
MEG KREIKEMEIER WRITES IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE on the uses and abuses of polls:
In early October 2004, Newsweek released a poll immediately after the first presidential debate, which showed a dramatic shift in public opinion in favor of John Kerry.
Did Kerry narrow the gap with his debate performance? Was he really the closer that many in the media had suggested he was? Newsweek was basing its headline “The Race is On” and accompanying story on a comparison between its two most recent polls. The problem, though, was that the polling data was inconsistent.
The October Newsweek poll sampled more Democrats than it did Republicans.
And the first poll, conducted in September 2004, sampled more Republicans than Democrats, not at all reflective of the historical composition of registered voters. . . .
Given the swing in demographics between the two Newsweek polls, of course Kerry saw improvement in his results. In fact, if he hadn’t he would have been in deep trouble.
And while President Bush’s support among Republicans eroded a bit between the polls, his support among Democrats actually increased. Kerry’s support among Republicans went up slightly, and his support among Democrats remained flat.
So why the breathless headlines?
Why did the news media report the data without first thoroughly reviewing it?
Why did the change in poll results pique the curiosity of a stay-at-home mom like me but not the much-ballyhooed investigative instincts of the reporters covering the election?
Read the whole thing. And congratulations to the Tribune for addressing the issue.
CHRIS NOLAN is calling Bush’s stance on stem cells “UnAmerican.”
I’m not sure that applies, but I do think that it’s wrong, and counterproductive.
MORE PROBLEMS AT THE HUFFINGTON POST, this time with their blogroll. I guess the “shakedown” period is still underway. . . .
BILL QUICK has put together a blog reporter’s kit that’s very similar to one I was writing about earlier. He’s quite pleased with it.
EXCELLENT ADVICE: “So, in the conclusion, please be kind to our internet friends. The sphere of the blogs it is big enough for all.”
ANTI-AMERICANISM hasn’t saved Gerhard Schroeder, as he just suffered another electoral defeat. More here.
NEWSWEEK puts the American flag in a trash can? And yet they’re complaining about Koran-in-the-toilet reports.
I suspect that they’re going to hear about this now. But there probably won’t be, you know, riots or anything.
UPDATE: Ed Driscoll notes, correctly, that many American journalistic enterprises engage in more America-bashing abroad than at home. I suspect that the Internet will make that much harder, as people are starting to pay attention, and to compare this stuff.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Brian Dunn has more thoughts.
MORE: Some readers wonder if it’s a photoshop. Well, you’re always right to acknowledge the possibility, but I doubt it. First, the blog it’s on has been around a while. Second, I got this email from Hong Kong reader Mac Overton:
Yep, the American flag in the garbage can showed up here as well. They asked me to “resubscribe” a couple of months ago, but I’ve refused. I’m simply exhausted from all the negativity. I used to like Fareed Zakaria, but I’ve found him to be annoying, self-righteous, and downright unpleasant of late.
Funny enough, they still send me a copy of Newsweek every week even though I’m no longer paying for it. I wonder if there are enough others like me reading the International edition who are now simply “fed up.” Yet, they continue to mail copies simply to keep up their “circulation” figures? Just another wild conspiracy theory in my little backyard….
A lot of newspapers seem to be doing that last, as I’ve noted before. Meanwhile, reader Jason Davis emails from Jakarta:
I’m an American living in Jakarta, Indonesia. On the whole Indonesia is a very friendly, moderate country where Muslims, Christians, and Hindus generally get along far better than news reports (from the left and right) would lead you to believe.
However, since the Newsweek story I have been worried for the first time since I’ve been here. The crazies now have an issue (true or not does not matter). I don’t mind America having to answer for things we ACTUALLY did but this is ridiculous. What really worries us the additional stories that will come in effort to defend Newsweek.
We have receieved a large number of official warnings over the last week from our corporate security group and our working group’s various embassies. [Warning emails from the Embassy and reports of Americans being stalked and harassed omitted.]
We are sitting here hoping the MSM in the U.S. will learn some small lesson from all of this and stop lobbing bomb shells our way. Stories like this are nothing more than toxic by product not very different from a 1930′s factory belching smoke. Back then the factory operators ignored all the external effects of their actions in the name of profit. The factories eventually cleaned up their act, will the reporters?
We’ll see.
And a note to the journalists: Davis’s email is a reminder that “free enterprise” and “freedom of contract” once seemed just as sacrosanct as “freedom of the press” does today.
MALAYSIAN TEX-MEX CHEF RAJAN RISHYAKARAN WRITES: “BTW, the cooking side of me doesn’t mean that I’m gay or (I wish) metrosexual. It just means I’m perpetually fat.”
Actually, I think you do a lot better cooking at home than eating out. I made shrimp provencal last night, and it was delicious and (relatively) low fat — certainly much healthier than it would have been at a restaurant.
VIOLENCE IN AZERBAIJAN: Gateway Pundit has a roundup on the pro-democracy protests, and what happened.
BLOGGLEDYGOOK notes Frank Rich’s cognitive dissonance over Islam.
This related post at The Belmont Club is worth reading, too.
TIM WORSTALL HAS POSTED THE LATEST BritBlog Roundup.
And this weekend’s Carnival of Cordite is up, too.
SISSY WILLIS blogs on commencement speeches, successful and otherwise.
REVEALING COMMENTS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES:
For a certain segment of the population, Nascar’s raid on American culture — its logo festoons everything from cellphones to honey jars to post office walls to panties; race coverage, it can seem, has bumped everything else off television; and, most piercingly, Nascar dads now get to pick our presidents — triggers the kind of fearful trembling the citizens of Gaul felt as the Huns came thundering over the hills. To these people, stock-car racing represents all that’s unsavory about red-state America: fossil-fuel bingeing; lust for violence; racial segregation; run-away Republicanism; anti-intellectualism (how much brain matter is required to go fast and turn left, ad infinitum?); the corn-pone memes of God and guns and guts; crass corporatization; Toby Keith anthems; and, of course, exquisitely bad fashion sense. What’s more, they simply don’t get it. What’s the appeal of watching . . . traffic? It’s as if ”Hee Haw” reruns were dominating prime time, and the Republic was slapping its collective knee at Grandpa Jones’s ”What’s for supper?” routine. With Nascar’s recent purchase of a swath of real estate on Staten Island, where it intends to plop down an 80,000-seat racetrack and retail center for the untapped New York City market, the onslaught seems poised on the brink of full-out conquest. Cover your ears, blue America. The Huns are revving their engines.
As a reader suggests, “Replace ‘NASCAR’ with ‘Hip-hop,’ and then ask yourself whether this would have run in the Times.” Certainly the editors would have objected to the condescension and stereotyping that run throughout.
On the other hand, perhaps this NASCAR stuff has gone a bit too far. . .
UPDATE: My race-car-driving brother notes that if you want real diversity, you should forget NASCAR and check out drag racing. Note the very cool photos. Meanwhile, reader Tom Carter emails:
Wow – what an article. Jonathan Miles has it all wrong. I’m having a hard time accepting the fact that a contributing writer for what is typically held as a good paper would fall into such blantant prejudices. Once again this smacks of the “blues” having a free pass at throwing stones. I wonder if Miles has ever been to a NASCAR function or even driven a stock car.
“The cars the drivers pilot — modified Chevy Monte Carlos, Ford Tauruses, Pontiac Grand Prix — are not so different from the cars Nascar fans use daily to pick up their groceries, shuttle their kids and get themselves to work.”
Statements like that are just an indicator that this man has absolutey no idea of what he’s writing about, and this just fuels the granishing disatisfaction with traditional media and their inability to effectively research their material.
Yeah. There’s not much overlap between a NASCAR “stock” car and the actual stock vehicle of the same name, and hasn’t been in ages.
I don’t mind these articles in which the Times tries to explain red states to its readership (and unlike my brother, I don’t care much for racing as a spectator sport) but I’d like them to do a better, and less-condescending, job of it.
ANOTHER UPDATE: SSgt J.P. Dawson emails:
Hey InstaDude,
In the Air Force (I’m active duty) I encounter a small group of hip-hop fans and a couple of Nascar fans every night at work on the midnight shift. There are conversations about Jay-Z and Nelly, as well as Dale, Jr. and Jeff Gordon. I tease both crowds, as we all tease each other about something. My New Yawk accent and thinning hair are the targets for them.
I’d never be so condescending of either group. Perhaps those of us in the military are just much more tolerant than the staff at the NY Times.
I think so, actually.
ELECTIONS IN MONGOLIA: Publius reports that things are going pretty well. That’s excellent news.
COMING SOON, new research on the health benefits of whiskey and cigars:
The vitamin is D, nicknamed the “sunshine vitamin” because the skin makes it from ultraviolet rays. Sunscreen blocks its production, but dermatologists and health agencies have long preached that such lotions are needed to prevent skin cancer. Now some scientists are questioning that advice. The reason is that vitamin D increasingly seems important for preventing and even treating many types of cancer.
In the last three months alone, four separate studies found it helped protect against lymphoma and cancers of the prostate, lung and, ironically, the skin. The strongest evidence is for colon cancer. . . .
So the thinking is this: Even if too much sun leads to skin cancer, which is rarely deadly, too little sun may be worse.
No one is suggesting that people fry on a beach. But many scientists believe that “safe sun” – 15 minutes or so a few times a week without sunscreen – is not only possible but helpful to health.
One is Dr. Edward Giovannucci, a Harvard University professor of medicine and nutrition who laid out his case in a keynote lecture at a recent American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Anaheim, Calif.
His research suggests that vitamin D might help prevent 30 deaths for each one caused by skin cancer.
“I would challenge anyone to find an area or nutrient or any factor that has such consistent anti-cancer benefits as vitamin D,” Giovannucci told the cancer scientists. “The data are really quite remarkable.”
It’s actually no surprise. Indeed, I’ve long been suspicious of the “all sun is bad for your” attitude of dermatologists, which has always seemed way over the top.
UPDATE: Bill Ardolino has a much longer post on dermatologists and sun from last year.
I AM A CITIZEN JOURNALIST.
Here is my pie.
UPDATE: It was strawberry. Yum. No wonder some people are jealous.
READER JAMES MCCORMICK EMAILS:
Does the latest NYT articles on deaths-in-custody in Afghanistan smack of diversion to take the heat off Newsweek? Set a fire somewhere else so Newsweek never has to acknowledge any responsibility for its acts. Newsweek can return the favour during the next NYT scandal. The MSM guild is all about authority without responsibility. Can’t have that change …
And it’s not just the NYT, as I’ve seen other examples of this phenomenon in quite a few outlets. As Martin Peretz noted, they’re circling the wagons. But by doing so, they’re only making things worse for themselves, as people are noticing. As The Mudville Gazette notes, people actually do more than just look at the pictures.
UPDATE: Reader Richard McEnroe emails: “Circling the wagons worked better in the days before blogging mortars and digital smart bombs. These days we call that a ‘bull’s-eye.’”
Heh.
CATHY YOUNG looks at when it’s politically correct to beat gays and kill women.
TODAY IS ARMED FORCES DAY: BlackFive has a roundup.
GATEWAY PUNDIT HAS MORE on the pro-democracy rally in Cuba, complete with video.
REDSTATE BUSTS THE HUFFINGTON POST for hotlinking. Give the newbies a break: They’ll catch on.
AUSTIN BAY plans his stint as guest editor at Newsweek.
TREY JACKSON is hosting the first-ever Carnival of the Videos. It’s quite cool, but I hope that we’ll see more original video shot by bloggers.
A FEW DAYS AGO, I wondered if we were going to see dirty tricks against the Blogosphere.
The answer is yes, and sooner than I realized. In fact, I was behind the curve, because earlier this week, gun-control proponents sent fake threatening emails under Joel Rosenberg’s name in an effort to stop passage of gun-rights legislation in Minnesota.
Shameful, but not especially surprising. More background here and here.
And for those who will inevitably ask, yes, this is the same Joel Rosenberg who is well-known for his fantasy novels.
LARRY KUDLOW SAYS IT’S A DREARY POLITICAL SPRING for small-government types:
Which leads us to a difficult question: Is the White House and its congressional allies selling policy reforms that voters simply are not buying? The seemingly more popular issue of tax reform is not even on the table. But will tax-reform commissioners Connie Mack and John Breaux ever get their proposals to see the light of day in the current obstructionist congressional climate? . . .
All senators have dirt on their hands these days. The Senate, if you can believe it, just delivered a budget-busting pork-laden $295 billion highway bill, featuring several thousand special-interest earmarks and a phony tax-transfer from general revenues to the trust fund. Where was the allegedly conservative Republican-controlled Senate? This bill was voted through 89 to 11, opening the door for President Bush’s very first veto.
Oh, and let’s not forget a potential trade and currency war with China and perhaps Europe as well. But at least this is backed by a bipartisan coalition anchored by Sen. Smoot Schumer and Sen. Hawley Graham.
Well, that’s cheerful. But he’s basically right. And I hope Bush vetoes the highway bill, but I’m not counting on it.
LEBANON UPDATE: Was Hezbollah involved in the Hariri assassination? “The news item may never be confirmed simply because no one wants it to be.”
UNSCAM UPDATE: The Weekly Standard has put oil-for-food on its cover. You may want to read this piece on Saddam’s business partners by Stephen F. Hayes, and this piece by Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway:
I knew a bit about Galloway. He had had to resign as the head of a charity called “War on Want,” after repaying some disputed expenses for living the high life in dirt-poor countries. Indeed, he was a type well known in the Labour movement. Prolier than thou, and ostentatiously radical, but a bit too fond of the cigars and limos and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was slightly too expensive. By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your feet or at your throat; a bit of a backslapper, nothing’s too good for the working class: what the English call a “wide boy.” . . . Galloway says that the worst day of his entire life was the day the Soviet Union fell. His existence since that dreadful event has involved the pathetic search for an alternative fatherland. He has recently written that, “just as Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraq’s own Great Leap Forward.” I love the word “scale” in that sentence. I also admire the use of the word “plotted.” . . .
Perhaps I may be allowed a closing moment of sentiment here? To the left, the old East End of London was once near-sacred ground. It was here in 1936 that a massive demonstration of longshoremen, artisans, and Jewish refugees and migrants made a human wall and drove back a determined attempt by Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to mount a march of intimidation. The event is still remembered locally as “The Battle of Cable Street.” That part of London, in fact, was one of the few place in Europe where the attempt to raise the emblems of fascism was defeated by force.
And now, on the same turf, there struts a little popinjay who defends dictatorship abroad and who trades on religious sectarianism at home. Within a month of his triumph in a British election, he has flown to Washington and spat full in the face of the Senate. A megaphone media in London, and a hysterical fan-club of fundamentalists and political thugs, saw to it that he returned as a conquering hero and all-round celeb. If only the supporters of regime change, and the friends of the Afghan and Iraqi and Kurdish peoples, could manifest anything like the same resolve and determination.
Read the whole thing.
DEMOCRACY IN CUBA takes another small step:
HAVANA, Cuba (CNN) — In what organizers called an unprecedented event, dissidents from groups opposed to Fidel Castro’s communist regime gathered publicly Friday and chanted “Down with Fidel.”
“Freedom! Freedom!” the group of more than 100 delegates cheered in the yard of Felix Bonne, a veteran dissident, in a working-class section of Havana. Castro’s regime would not allow the use of a theater or hotel for the assembly.
Participants included members of dissident groups that are sometimes at odds but share the goal of driving Castro from power.
More, including pictures, here, from Sardinian blogger Stefania, and, of course, just visit Babalu Blog and keep scrolling.
JEFF JARVIS IS CHANGING JOBS for something a bit, er, bloggier. Congratulations, Jeff!
YOU KNOW IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY when you read headlines like this:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The U.S. government does not want billboards in space.
The Federal Aviation Administration proposed Thursday to amend its regulations to ensure that it can enforce a law that prohibits “obtrusive” advertising in zero gravity.
Though actually this issue first came up back in the 1990s.
CHESTER CHARTS some odd coincidences in the Madrid bombing.
MORE WRONG NOTES ON STEM CELLS:
Setting up a showdown with Congress over the thorny issue of embryonic stem cell research, President Bush vowed today to veto any measure that would expand federal funding for the studies – an extremely rare personal threat from a president who has never exercised his veto power.
All the other lousy bills they’ve passed, and this is the first one he’ll veto?
UPDATE: He’s losing ‘em in Georgia!
MORE: “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.”
QUESTIONS ABOUT SPIRIT OF AMERICA: Michael Ubaldi addresses questions here, and arrives at a conclusion here. “Omar and Mohammed Fadhil have answered questions about their brother’s accusations against the Spirit of America, their observations confirming my supposition that Jim Hake’s charity has accomplished what is possible in an often difficult environment. Additional criticism of the Spirit of America echoed Ali’s complaints that the organization did not acknowledge offers or requests for other works projects from individual Iraqis; but such ‘shortcomings’ in the field of charity are best explained by limited time and money, and the wisdom of confining a scope of operations to what is practical rather than expanding out of sentiment.”
I’ve given them money, and free ads, so I’m glad to hear that. I hope they’ll work the kinks out.
MORE PRO-DEMOCRACY EFFORTS IN SYRIA:
One dissident who spent years in prison and who preferred to stay anonymous told Koring that, “If the outside pressure continues, then the barriers of fear will be broken . . . The regime is losing its grip because of outside pressure, but that pressure must be maintained.”
So let’s keep it up.
IN THE MAIL: A copy of Richard Posner’s new book, Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11. He’s not very impressed with the 9/11 Commission or the legislation that followed. Excerpt:
In a misguided quest for unanimity, a determination to use the political calendar, and a public relations campaign to force precipitate action on weakly supported proposals for far-reaching organizational change, the 9/11 Commission, abetted by a stampeded Congress, a politically cornered President, and a press that failed to subject the Commission’s recommendations to the searching scrutiny that the modern press reserves for scandals, disserved the cause of national security in a dangerous era. It did so by successfully promoting a bureaucratic reorganization that is more likely to be a recipe for bureaucratic infighting, impacted communication, diminished performance, tangled lines of command, and lowered morale than an improvement on the system.
He’s not mincing words.
YES, THEY’RE OLD NEWS, but Joe Gandelman is very unhappy with the latest reports of prisoner abuse, reported in today’s New York Times. He’s reminded of Franco’s regime — though I suspect that in Franco’s regime he wouldn’t have been allowed to say that, and the people involved wouldn’t be facing serious charges. Still, it’s a very worthwhile and level-headed post.
UPDATE: Roger Simon calls this “highly disturbing,” but also wonders why the Times didn’t make the whole document available online.
FRED KAPLAN ON UZBEKISTAN:
President Bush has declared repeatedly that U.S. policy toward foreign governments will be shaped, above all else, by their fealty to freedom and democracy. If he continues to treat the Uzbek government—which wantonly shoots its own people—as a special American ally when U.S. interests no longer require such favor, then his declarations will be increasingly seen as insincere, and other nasty regimes, which he may try to pressure into reform, will learn not to take his words seriously.
Indeed.
UPDATE: Jonathan Gewirtz agrees:
This is an important point and one too often forgotten by proponents of realpolitik. Our advocacy of human rights and democratic self-rule are not PR, they are force multipliers and critical to our strategy. We use them not to be PC but because the alternatives failed. That’s why it’s important not to brush the Uzbek crackdown under a diplomatic rug, even if the regime is our ally (and why we shouldn’t ignore things like this).
Indeed, again.
MORE: On the other hand, Nathan Hamm at Registan has questions, and sounds a cautionary note:
There’s nothing I’d like more than for Uzbekistan to be a democracy. Yesterday. But I’m hearing a lot of calls for what I must, at my most charitable, characterize as a shoot from the hip, emotionally satisfying response to the Andijon massacre. I can’t deny that a part of me doesn’t want to see that, but this situation is too serious to foul up. Believe you me, I want our policy to improve. But I want us to take fully into account the realities on the ground and be willing to swallow some of the realities that we don’t like for the sake of an effective long-term policy.
Read the whole thing.
MORE: StrategyPage says the bad guys have won, and it sounds like there’s not much we could have done about it:
Uzbek president Islam Karimov appears to have put down the brief uprising in the eastern park of Uzbekistan. Karimov is smart, well organized, corrupt and ruthless. The demonstrators his troops dispersed with force were opposed to the police state methods used to hunt down Islamic radicals. The only group willing to oppose Karimov with armed force are the Islamic radicals, who don’t have a lot of religious support in Uzbekistan. But a lot more people would support the Islamic radicals if it meant a less corrupt, and more effective, government. The unrest in Uzbekistan is more about economics than ideology.
That suggests both an avenue of approach, over the longer term, and a potential downside of not acting. Austin Bay observes:
Hamas played on this same desire – less corruption– among Palestinians sick of Arafat’s kleptocracy. The Taliban played the same game when it took power in Afghanistan, ie “We’re honest, the old regime was not.” Of course the Taliban then proceeded to slide into its own brand of malfeasance (including pay-offs).
He’s posting an interesting series on “how freedom spreads” that’s related, and worth reading.
ROBERT MUSIL: “Compared to Newsweek and much of the rest of the mainstream media, Microsoft is all about the consumer.”
Now that’s gotta hurt.
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF COMEDY is up.
MORE HATE SPEECH IN WASHINGTON, this time from Eleanor Holmes Norton:
Eleanor Holmes Norton calls it an assault on home rule orchestrated by the National Rifle Association. She accuses the gun lobby of attempting to see to it that more D-C children get killed.
Yeah, that’s it. Jeez.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE from Ann Althouse:
Did you know that the Constitution’s Framers considered requiring a supermajority vote in the Senate to reject the President’s judicial nominees?
I didn’t.
GATEWAY PUNDIT has more news and video from Uzbekistan, where the death toll is now said to top 1,000.
THE LIBERALS HAVE SURVIVED in Canada, by the skin or their teeth. Ed Morrissey has an analysis.
IN THE MAIL: Paul Sperry’s Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.
I suspect that there’s a lot more Saudi influence-buying, both within and outside the government, than is generally reported, and I’m somewhat suspicious of Grover Norquist’s ties. But this nonetheless seems a bit overwrought to me. If it’s as bad as Sperry says, we shouldn’t have managed to do anything.
A RATHER PESSIMISTIC EMAIL from Uzbekistan.
SCOTT GALUPO looks at movie math and box-office hype.
If I were a Republican legislator wanting to cause trouble, I’d sponsor a bill setting uniform and transparent accounting rules for the motion picture and record industries.
EUGENE VOLOKH IS SAVAGING RICK SANTORUM for his dumb Hitler remarks. “The precise nature of the equivalence with Hitler, I regret to say, escapes me. And in the absence of such equivalence or at least a very close similarity, it seems to me to be both unfair and in bad taste to compare your adversaries to Hitler, even when the analogy — a rather weak analogy, as I mentioned — is simply to his hubris rather than to his atrocities.”
Meanwhile, Tom Maguire notes a different kind of partisan excess.
TOM FRIEDMAN continues the theme I mentioned yesterday:
The greatest respect we can show to Arabs and Muslims – and the best way to help Muslim progressives win the war of ideas – is to take them seriously and stop gazing at our own navels. That means demanding that they answer for their lies, hypocrisy and profane behavior, just as much as we must answer for ours.
It’s interesting to see this idea taking off. Thanks, Newsweek!
UPDATE: And it just keeps spreading:
As a Muslim, I am able to purchase copies of the Quran in any bookstore in any American city, and study its contents in countless American universities. American museums spend millions to exhibit and celebrate Muslim arts and heritage. On the other hand, my Christian and other non-Muslim brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia–where I come from–are not even allowed to own a copy of their holy books. Indeed, the Saudi government desecrates and burns Bibles that its security forces confiscate at immigration points into the kingdom or during raids on Christian expatriates worshiping privately. . . .
The Saudi Embassy and other Saudi organizations in Washington have distributed hundreds of thousands of Qurans and many more Muslim books, some that have libeled Christians, Jews and others as pigs and monkeys. In Saudi school curricula, Jews and Christians are considered deviants and eternal enemies. By contrast, Muslim communities in the West are the first to admit that Western countries–especially the U.S.–provide Muslims the strongest freedoms and protections that allow Islam to thrive in the West. Meanwhile Christianity and Judaism, both indigenous to the Middle East, are maligned through systematic hostility by Middle Eastern governments and their religious apparatuses.
The lesson here is simple: If Muslims wish other religions to respect their beliefs and their Holy book, they should lead by example.
Indeed.
UPDATE: Varifrank is cool with this meme.
ANOTHER UPDATE: So is President Bush:
“These people are motivated by a vision of the world that is backward and barbaric,” Bush told reporters in the Oval Office where he met with the prime minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
Progress continues apace.
JOHN COLE notes Jane’s Law in action as polls show Republicans increasingly viewed as out of touch:
Again, Democrats should not take this as a sign that things are turning their way, because the poll shows disgust at them as well. But, as a life-long Republican, I have never been as disgusted with my party as I am right now, and I would have a hard time voting for the national Republican party right now.
To understand why, see his checklist of Republican principles abandoned by the party.
WITH PLENTY OF TIME TO SHOP FOR DINNER, this week’s Carnival of the Recipes is up!
SUBTLE HE IS, THAT GEORGE LUCAS: PunditGuy looks closely and wonders if the movie wasn’t really scripted by the Ratzinger faction.
ED DRISCOLL has MORE ON THE NEW STAR WARS MOVIE: “The first Star Wars, in 1977, was a fun little hot rod of a movie, appearing in the middle of a decade worth of great, but typically dark, cynical films. The majority of this film creaked and stumbled as badly as Darth Vader’s first steps when he emerges in his black mask and costume at the climax of the film.”
For some more positive takes, scroll down.
JIM GERAGHTY ON NEWSWEEK: “Call that whatever you like. But don’t call it journalism.”
Meanwhile, Michael Ubaldi emails:
I think we all know how likely it is the MSM emptied the warehouse of anything and everything related to detainees.
There’s no logical connection, but I suddenly remembered Michael Spann.
You won’t be hearing much about him, the next few days.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, some unanswered questions remain.
MORE STEM CELL GOOD NEWS:
State lawmakers yesterday rebuffed Governor Mitt Romney’s latest bid to bar scientists from cloning human cells and once again approved a measure that broadly endorses embryonic stem cell research.
The Legislature also rejected three other changes the Republican governor proposed. By large margins, lawmakers refused to take out wording defining when life begins, rejected his call to further limit what women can be paid for donating their eggs, and turned down his proposal to strengthen a ban on fertilizing eggs for research. Both the House and Senate reaffirmed the bill they approved last March and sent it back to Romney’s desk.
As I noted earlier, there’s a lot at stake here. I think that this opposition will backfire on Republicans.
UPDATE: Daniel Moore emails:
I’m not usually one to give politicians passes on what they try to do for political reasons, but Romney had to know that he had no chance of winning this. I suspect it was more of an attempt to show some conservative credentials as he moves towards a 2008 Presidential run. It’s hard to call Romney an ultra-right wing conservative in the vein of Pres. Bush, so he really doesn’t have to worry too much about that from the left. What he will have to worry about is making it through the primaries and having enough conservative credentials for it.
I agree that it’s mostly posturing.
The bind for the Republicans is that if stem cell research creates promising treatments or cures, they’ll look like they held them back. And if it doesn’t do so, they’ll be blamed for preventing it.
Isn’t the most significant sentence in David Corn’s report–on the International Committee of the Red Cross’ claims of Gitmo Koran abuse–this one (quoting Reuters)?
“The U.S. government took corrective measures and those allegations have not resurfaced,” [ICRC spokesman] Schorno said.
Depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. (Emph. added).
HOW WELL DID THE STILLSUITS WORK? I gather that they produced liquid, but that nobody really wanted to drink it. I guess you’d have to have spent a while in the desert, first.
DEMOCRACY IN CUBA? Not yet, but this is promising:
Citizens from 365 groups across the island are gathering this weekend to hammer out a compact for the creation of a free post-Castro Cuba. This Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba is meeting for the first time under the most incredible of conditions — inside communist Cuba. It could make history. . . .
The new assembly could create a Cuban Charter 77, the document that served as a road map for the post-communist Czechoslovakia under Vaclav Havel. And the group’s reasonings about how to design the new society it believes will happen resemble the deliberations of America’s Founding Fathers.
But risks are high. On Monday night, government henchmen pounded on the door to arrest one Society delegate, and several others were roughed up by Castro’s goons. As fear grows, there will be more thuggery before the week is done. But Society members vow not to quit, no matter what Castro tries.
I hope that this will get more attention.
I HOPE THIS REPORT of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan is better-sourced than Newsweek’s. Or maybe I don’t.
UPDATE: John Cole emails:
You have to know that this is going to be the most misinterpreted quote in blog history by tomorrow noon:
“I HOPE THIS REPORT of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan is better-sourced than Newsweek’s. Or maybe I don’t.”
I have been reading you since virtually day one, so I know exactly what you mean- you hope it is thinly sourced and thus the story is bullshit, because it is so damned disturbing.
Of course, you can be virtually assured that someone like James Wolcott or Atrios will by noon be claiming torture doesn’t matter to you, and only media bashing does…
Right now you are laughing because you know I am right.
On all counts.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Something you probably won’t hear from Wolcott and Atrios:
The paper’s lead story is a lurid account of the vicious treatment of two Afghan prisoners by U.S. soldiers — events that occurred in December 2002 and for which seven servicemen have been properly punished. Let me repeat that: December 2002. That’s two and a half years ago. Every detail published by the Times comes from a report done by the U.S. military, which did the investigating and the punishing. The publication of this piece this week is an effort not to get at the truth, not to praise the military establishment for rooting out the evil being done, but to make the point that the United States is engaged in despicable conduct as it fights the war on terror. In the name of covering the behinds of media colleagues, all is fair in hate and war.
If the news media policed themselves as well as the military does, Newsweek wouldn’t be in this kind of trouble. (Emph. added).
MORE: Bruce Rolston notes that punishment hasn’t actually happened yet, as the trial process is still underway. Fair point, but it’s not like the NYT is breaking news here.
RON BAILEY looks at some promising new Korean research and says we’ve entered the age of therapeutic cloning. Sounds good to me. Here’s more from the Financial Times:
Scientists have cloned embryos for the first time from patients with serious diseases and injuries. The research at Seoul National University in South Korea demonstrates the principle of “therapeutic cloning” producing stem cells genetically identical to the patient, which could repair any damaged or diseased tissue.
Hwang Woo-suk, the study leader, called it “a giant step forward towards the day when some of mankind’s most devastating diseases and injuries can be effectively treated through the use of therapeutic stem cells”.
As Bailey notes:
The House of Representatives has twice voted to criminalize precisely this research, proposing to toss therapeutic cloning researchers into prison for up to ten years and fine them one million dollars. In fact, if this effort to criminalize research on cloned human stem cells were to succeed, Americans who go abroad to seek cloned stem cell treatments, say, to cure their diabetes, could be jailed for up to ten years for illegally “importing” cloned stem cells. The Bush Administration was also pushing the United Nations to adopt a treaty to outlaw both cloning to produce transplants and reproductive cloning.
The Bush Administration is wrong on this, and they’re likely to get politically steamrollered if they make a fight of it, once people realize that they, or their family, are at risk of dying from otherwise curable diseases if this kind of legislation passes.
THE NEW NIKON D70 FIRMWARE UPGRADE 2.0 is out.
INTERESTING POST ON BUSH AND LEBANON, by a Lebanese blogger.
DAVE KOPEL ANALYZES Florida’s new self-defense law. It may well be coming to your state and, let’s hope, one day to Britain.
MARTIN PERETZ ON NEWSWEEK, IN THE NEW REPUBLIC:
The journalistic establishment is circling the wagons, of course. Journalists usually blame themselves last and forgive themselves first. They are taking special umbrage at the White House’s indignation about Newsweek’s iniquity and insisting that this is the pot calling the kettle anti-Muslim. It is certainly true that the Bush administration, at Guantánamo and at Abu Ghraib, is responsible for a good deal of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world (see Noah Feldman, “Ugly Americans,” page 23). The Bush administration is not perfectly qualified to give lessons in transparency. But, if Scott McClellan should not be allowed to hide behind Michael Isikoff, neither should Michael Isikoff be allowed to hide behind Scott McClellan. The subject this week is not the misdeeds of government. The subject this week is the misdeeds of journalism. No wonder many editors and editorialists want to change the subject.
“We feel badly”: With those insultingly wan words, Whitaker thinks that he has wrapped things up. All of Newsweek’s penitential protestations notwithstanding, what emerges from this episode is the image of a profession that is complacent, self-righteous, and hopelessly in love with itself. Is this a terrible generalization? Well, there are 17 people who lost their lives because of the state of journalistic practice at a U.S. magazine. When American journalists do not think of themselves as heroes, they think of themselves as victims; but here they are neither. They are–I mean Isikoff and his editors–simply scavengers.
“Complacent, self-righteous, and hopelessly in love with itself.” Ouch.
SAW THE NEW STAR WARS MOVIE this afternoon with some colleagues (including one who, beneath her cool professional exterior, is such a stone geek that she and her friends in college tried to manufacture Dune-style stillsuits). My take: (1) The political angle is way overblown. In fact, the Kenobi “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes” line is deeply ironic, since immediately afterward Anakin/Vader plays the moral relativism card, responding that while Obi-Wan may think Palpatine is evil, that’s all a matter of opinion: From his point of view the Jedi are evil. The NYT editorial board couldn’t have done it better! (2) Unfortunately, the movie nonetheless stinks. My dean’s comment was that it would have played better as a silent movie, and he’s right — you might as well be reading the dialogue off of cards, because the actors sure sound like they’re reading the dialogue off of cards. Exacerbating this problem, the audio stunk. Actors’ words didn’t always sync perfectly with their lips, nobody even tried to capture room ambience to match the settings, and the lines often sounded dubbed — delivered as if into a microphone while reading hurriedly from a script, as they probably were. 90210 had more convincing acting.
The effects were great, but I couldn’t bring myself to care all that much. Really, nothing special, and, of course, drastically inferior to the original movies.
UPDATE: I like this from Chris Suellentrop:
What’s great about Star Wars—and one of the reasons I think it has greater appeal—is its acknowledgement, even celebration, of the irrational, the mystical, the religious. More than one friend of mine—OK, me and one friend of mine—sat in our separate backyards as children trying to move rocks with our minds. Star Wars isn’t political, but liberals are now trying to adopt it as their own, by claiming that Revenge of the Sith is an allegory for the Bush administration. Um, does that mean that Osama Bin Laden is a Jedi?
The whole thing is amusing.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Will Collier calls it “story-rich and emotionally engaging.” Boy, he saw it differently than I did.
MORE: Hmm. I should have taken Ann Althouse’s position. But who would pay me $500 for this review? Not even via tipjar . . .
MORE STILL: Speaking of economics (sort of), Tyler Cowen offers a Public Choice analysis of the Jedi Council, which explains why the Galaxy was doomed to go to pot.
Meanwhile, reader Aaron Azlant emails:
You’re right about the unintentional irony in the fact that Anakin/Vader plays the relativist card soon after the “only a Sith thinks in absolutes” line. I’d argue that the irony is further deepened by the fact that Obi-Wan’s line is itself also an absolute statement.
Indeed.
STILL MORE: Complexities abound: “The movie’s only voice of tolerance and relativism was Palpatine, advising Anakin that the only way to be truly great is to understand all aspects of the Force!”
I also agree with this bit:
Star Wars revolutionised special effects in 1977 because it used giant, highly detailed models of ships that looked real because they were. It’s why the opening shot of Star Wars was recently voted the #1 special effect of all time. Unfortunately Industrial Light and Magic has abandoned its roots and the opening of Episode III looks more like the dodgy Babylon 5 television show. There is no physicality to the proto-Star Destroyers in this movie, so no matter how many there are in the battle above Coruscant, there is no sense of awe because it just feels like a video game.
I think that when you work with CGI stuff too much, you lose sight of what looks real. On the other hand, Tai Vokins takes a more positive view:
The new Star Wars (Revenge of the Sith) rocked my socks off last night. I can’t wait to see it again. And I also can’t wait to hear the loosers complain about it. I’m already reading reviews that critcize the acting, and the writing. But what the hell did you expect?
And I like this bit: “What really pisses me off is a lot of these people who complain about star wars are going to see it again! Its like the movie will somehow change and get better.”
Malaysian blogger Sandalsilver liked it, too: “The final episode of the saga, Revenge of the Sith was worth the wait.” He thinks the acting was bad, though. But this Malaysian blogger wasn’t impressed: “Revenge of the Sith tanked and stank to high heaven.”
Kevin Dangoor calls it “Excellent,” but is disappointed that Jar-Jar Binks didn’t meet a gruesome end.
Scott Rushing writes: “Revenge of the Sith was much better than I had hoped for. The CGI has improved tremendously, even in just the last three years. The acting was not as stiff as I had feared.”
And Lovelain calls it “The Passion of the Christ for Star Wars fans,” which is weirdly appropriate, in a way.
SyntheticLife, meanwhile, gives the guy who sat next to him a pretty harsh review: “I would’ve said something but then I got scared when he started talking to the characters in the movie.”
THIS IS A PARODY, RIGHT? Please let this be a parody. (Via The Zero Boss).
THE BELMONT CLUB has thoughts on the political turmoil in Canada.
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who runs the liberal blog Daily Kos, told Salon that he’ll stop linking to Times Op-Eds once the new policy goes into effect. “I think this is the best way they can become irrelevant,” he said.
“If my readers can’t read it, why would I link to it? The key to blogging is that readers can look at the source material and make up their own minds.”
Absolutely.
DONALD SENSING offers advice on successful public speaking and cultural sensitivity to the President of Pepsico: “Rhetorically, Nooyi’s speech was a mess. More than that, it was insulting to the graduates. She talked down to them and sought to impart a sense of shame where they had done no wrong.”
SOME PEOPLE, APPARENTLY, weren’t paying attention during the Eason Jordan affair. This has John Cole, who has been defending Newsweek, depressed. More background here.
RAND SIMBERG NOTES that ABC News is rewriting history on filibusters and the Civil Rights Act.
Hosni Mubarak must think that George W. Bush is a chump. The Egyptian pharaoh apparently realizes that the U.S. president is serious about spreading freedom and democracy to the Middle East, but he still thinks he can get away with cosmetic changes that do nothing to seriously change the ugly nature of his regime.
Read the whole thing.
BLAME THE CRAZY MUSLIMS: This seems to be the rapidly-gelling defense of Newsweek.
That’s certainly the tack that David Brooks is taking in today’s New York Times (though if he thinks only right-wing bloggers see the press as anti-military, perhaps he should call up Terry Moran). Brooks writes:
The people who seized upon this item, like the radical clerics in Afghanistan, are cynical in the way they manipulate episodes like this to whip up hatred and so magnify their own standing.
At the same time, they believe everything that could be alleged about America – and more. They’ve spent so many years inhabiting a delusional mental landscape filled with conspiracy theories and paranoia that you could drill deep into their minds without ever touching reality.
Finally, they are strategically ruthless. Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker, who has spent years reporting on extremists, says they use manufactured spasms of hatred to desensitize their followers. After followers spend a few years living through rabid riots and vicious sermons, killing an American or a Jew or even a fellow Muslim seems no more consequential than killing a mosquito. That’s how suicide bombers are made.
The rioters are the real enemy, not Newsweek and not the American soldiers serving as prison guards. Just to restore some proper perspective, let me quote a snippet from a sermon delivered by Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris, which ran last weekend on the Palestinian Authority’s official TV station:
“The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquillity under our rule because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews – even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.”
These are the extremists, the real enemy. Let’s keep our eye on the ball.
True enough — and as Christopher Hitchens and Austin Bay have been saying, media outlets like the Times have been failing to point this out in the past.
It may have taken a journalistic scandal to unclog the pipes, but it’s nice to see people finally noticing this, and holding the “Arab” (or at least Muslim) “street” to account as moral agents. That hardly excuses Newsweek’s journalistic failings, though. (And I suspect that if a falsehood by Rush Limbaugh had led to a race riot, people wouldn’t be taking this tack.) Still, with David Brooks, Jeff Jacoby and Tom Friedman all on the same page here, perhaps the press will begin to recognize that this isn’t Vietnam redux, but an entirely different sort of war. One in which, I should note, the enemy counts on journalists to be sloppy, biased, and willing to excuse or ignore Islamist extremism in the service of domestic politics.
UPDATE: Brian Dunn emails that he predicted this. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis comments on Brooks:
Whining media bashers? How about dissatisifed media consumers? How about disappointed fellow journalists? How about unhappy fellow Americans?
Brooks is right to say that it’s silly and offensive to bash Newsweek and not bash the fanatical murderers who used this report as an excuse to kill.
But I think he’s wrong not to bash Nesweek himself, not to also criticize the magazine for making such an irresponsible error.
Brooks spends a paragraph saying that he used to work at Newsweek and he likes those guys and doesn’t believe they’re commies and that’s very nice.
But by not criticizing the report, the net message of this otherwise spot-on column is that press people defend press people, that we circle our wagons around our screw-ups, that we stick together first. Especially today, with the press’ trust in tatters, that is the wrong message.
There’s certainly a lot of wagon-circling going on.
Related thoughts, here.
MORE: Tom Maguire notes cognitive dissonance and historical revisionism on this subject over the past week.
MUCH MORE ON EVENTS IN UZBEKISTAN, over at Registan.
BILL WHITTLE has posted a new essay. Here’s the link to part one.
UNSCAM UPDATE: Another oil-for-food exclusive over at Roger Simon’s. Roger: “I will post any response from Mr. Volcker as soon as I learn of it.”
THERE’S NOT MUCH INFORMATION on Ron Bailey’s new book, but the article I linked below says it’s coming out next month. It certainly sounds interesting, and timely.
ASPARAGIRL: “I didn’t intend to become a roof-skulking lease-breaking veggie-pusher, really.”
HAS NATIONAL REVIEW FLIP-FLOPPED ON FILIBUSTERS?
ELECTIONS IN ETHIOPIA: Will Franklin has a roundup.
UPDATE: Ethiopia-bog Ethiopundit — which I just found out about — has been covering these for a while. Just keep scrolling. The verdict is unfavorable.
UZBEKISTAN UPDATE: Publius has more thoughts on the massacre, and an observation: “When, inevitably, Uzbekistan comes to reform, the people are going to remember who their friends were when they lived under a government they hated.”
And Gateway Pundit has another big roundup with links, photos, and video.
MEDIA BIAS AS MARKET SEGMENTATION: Virginia Postrel has some thoughts.
TIMING is everything.
TERRY OGLESBY IS FOOD-COURT FASHIONBLOGGING: “But there are some folks, folks who think they are REALLY out there pushing the outside of the envelope, and, well, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya: ‘You keep wearing those clothes. I do not think they look the way you think they look.’”
On the other hand, the news is not all dark and gloomy: “The return of sartorial standards among the young American men it makes the Manolo most happy.”
RON BAILEY spends a day at the Brain Spa:
Chatterjee cited an interesting poll in which people were asked whether they would give a safe drug to a child that would enhance his or her ability to learn to play the piano if they had the opportunity. Half of the respondents said absolutely not. They regarded learning the piano through persistent practice as character building and using pills as a cheat. However, the other half had no problem at all with giving kids a piano pill. What sets the stage for social and political conflict over enhancement technologies is that people on both sides in the poll were completely convinced that their view would be shared by everybody.
Chatterjee ended by joking that if his next NIH grant got turned down, he might “stop what I’m doing and open up a brain spa.” Whether or not he decides to hang out a shingle, he predicted, “There will be a brain spa opening close to you in the near future.”
I think they’ll do good business.
LARRY KUDLOW says we’re blundering on China: “The only thing more dangerous than forcing China off the dollar standard is the protectionist idea being advanced by Senators Smoot Schumer and Hawley Graham.”
PHOTO-COLTBLOGGING over at Red Georgia Clay: This is timely stuff. One of my sister’s horses is about to foal, and she’s been nervous all day.
HUGH HEWITT interviewed Terry Moran regarding the back-and-forth at yesterday’s White House Press Briefing. The transcript is here.
UPDATE: Reader Dart Montgomery thinks that this is the Moran money quote:
It comes from, I think, a huge gulf of misunderstanding, for which I lay plenty of blame on the media itself. There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it’s very dangerous.
Indeed.
MICHAEL TOTTEN says the Cedar Revolution is coming to Syria.
BLOGGER NICK GENES was on the Alitalia flight that was diverted yesterday for antiterrorism reasons. He reports what it was like, and has some questions and complaints for the authorities.
ARE WE LIKELY TO SEE “dirty tricks” aimed at the blogosphere? I explore the possibility over at GlennReynolds.com, and draw some lessons from history.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, a Brit who has not gone soft in the war on terror, wonders why the New York Times is reluctant to call terrorists terrorists?
The Bin Ladenists did have a sort of “governing program,” expressed in part by their Taliban allies and patrons. This in turn reflected a “unified ideology.” It can be quite easily summarized: the return of the Ottoman Empire under a caliphate and a return to the desert religious purity of the seventh century (not quite the same things, but that’s not our fault). In the meantime, anyway, war to the end against Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and Shiites. None of the “experts” quoted in the article appeared to have remembered these essentials of the al-Qaida program, but had they done so, they might not be so astounded at the promiscuous way in which the Iraqi gangsters pump out toxic anti-Semitism, slaughter Nepalese and other Asian guest-workers on video and gloat over the death of Hindus, burn out and blow up the Iraqi Christian minority, kidnap any Westerner who catches their eye, and regularly inflict massacres and bombings on Shiite mosques, funerals, and assemblies. . . .
The Bin Laden and Zarqawi organizations, and their co-thinkers in other countries, have gone to great pains to announce, on several occasions, that they will win because they love death, while their enemies are so soft and degenerate that they prefer life. Are we supposed to think that they were just boasting when they said this? Their actions demonstrate it every day, and there are burned-out school buses and clinics and hospitals to prove it, as well as mosques (the incineration of which one might think to be a better subject for Islamic protest than a possibly desecrated Quran, in a prison where every inmate is automatically issued with one.)
You’d think so, wouldn’t you?
UPDATE: Reader Barry Dauphin emails:
Yes, Hitchens actually takes bin Laden and Zarqawi seriously. He might revile them but he shows them enough respect to listen to their words. Anyone who reads the bin Laden fatwas knows what he’s up to; it’s all there. Either the NYT and others haven’t really read them or they think “he can’t be serious.” And today Krugman is bloviating that the war in Iraq is Vietnam redux and is making us weaker day by day. And the NYT actually wants people to pay for that crap?
There’s a subscriber born every minute.
75 DEGREES SOUTH is a pretty cool blog from Antarctica. Where things are always pretty cool.
JUST IN TIME FOR HURRICANE SEASON: It’s a new weather-blog called Storm Track, by Jordan Golson.
TV VIA THE INTERNET: It looks like it’s finally coming true.
ANDREW SULLIVAN writes that he didn’t mean to claim that wrapping someone in an Israeli flag was torture, even though he listed it with other things that he clearly did regard as torture, and drew no distinction. He asks me to correct the record; I wish instead that he would try writing on (and thinking about) this subject with the clarity and seriousness of which he has shown himself capable in the past. All evidence suggests, however, that I am likely to be disappointed.
UPDATE: Reader Christopher Levenick notes that in an earlier post, Andrew specificially included wrapping in an Israeli flag under the heading ANTI-ISLAMIC TORTURE. If Andrew doesn’t regard flag-wrapping as torture, then pehaps he should refrain from this sort of thing in the future. I’ve suggested in the past that Sullivan would be more persuasive in a cause with which I actually agree (I’ve long been anti-torture, after all) if he displayed more rigor and didn’t turn the volume to “11.” That remains true. I’m not interested in an inter-blog pissing match; I tend to take a blog-and-let-blog approach to these sorts of things. But I think that Andrew’s take on these issues hasn’t accomplished what he hopes to accomplish, and I don’t think that it will do so in the future if his approach remains the same.
