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Friday, January 07, 2005 |
Restoring integrity to the White House, number 74, 131: Sorry, kids.
USA Today has revealed that conservative radio host Armstrong Williams collected $240,000 in taxpayer funds from the Department of Education after signing a contract which obligated him to promote George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act on air and to...
[Kicking Ass]
Did we mention that this appears on its face to be a violation of federal law on the part of the White House? The second big ones of these to come to light (the other being slick "news" segments, rather than paying someone to flack)?
8:45:47 PM 
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NY Times to Charge for Online Viewing?.
Reuters: New York Times Mulls Charging Web Readers. According to the upcoming issue of BusinessWeek magazine, whose cover story focuses on The New York Times Co., an internal debate has been raging at the newspaper over whether its online edition, which had about 18.5 million unique monthly visitors as of November, should adopt a subscription fee. I'd probably pay. Then again, I've been paying for Web journalism for years, for such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Salon and Consumer Reports (I even paid for Slate when it was charging). Part of my motivation has been to support online journalism. But part has been the value I received. Would you pay for the Times online?
[Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism]
I suspect I would not, as I already pay them beaucoup dinero to get dead trees in my driveway each morn. (It usually is the driveway, too, within eight inches, as we've in the main been blessed with excellent delivery people.)
8:43:32 PM
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From Benton Headlines:
GOT AN OLD PC? DON'T TRASH IT: RECYCLE IT
EBay unfurled an initiative Thursday to lead PC makers and environmental
groups in a major push to recycle more of the 400 million electronic
products that are trashed annually.
[SOURCE: USAToday, AUTHOR: Jon Swartz]
3:34:37 PM
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The tsunami aftermath: One first responder worries that the
right experts aren't getting to
the right places, by Katherine Schlatter, in The Scientist. (Free
for a day, I think, then behind the subscription wall.)
1:34:17 PM
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Now playing at
The Inkwell: A conversation
with Bruce Sterling. Bruce has been holding forth on ubiquitous
computing, the melting of the polar caps, the Napsterization of
physical property, Creative Commons, whether television is doomed, and
on product counterfeiting in Serbia, about which he remarked:
Everybody's
his own smuggler; everybody's got cousins offshore who send
money and gifts home. They all experienced international
sanctions for years. They're not gonna strengthen the hands
of intellectual property lords like the WTO or WIPO or RIAA.
It just means building new whips so that NATO and the Europeans
and the UN can scourge them.
So it's not like a state conspiracy to pilfer; it's more like
the Dutch and hashish. You just don't look real hard,
and the traffic takes care of itself.
A lot of the retailers who are behind the flow of
fakes are refugees who lost everything. They were
living out of car trunks. Now they're living out
of kiosks, and they're kinda nicely settled in there;
some of those Balkan kiosks have TVs, neon,
and smokestacks.
(You can join the conversation
from the beginning or catch up on
the most recent posts. (And if those urls break in transit, you can
use
these, respectively.))
12:34:09 PM
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Worse Than Fiction. Reality continues to be worse than any novel I could write. By PAUL KRUGMAN. [NYT > Opinion]
In my bad novel, a famous moralist who demanded national outrage over an affair and writes best-selling books about virtue will turn out to be hiding an expensive gambling habit. A talk radio host who advocates harsh penalties for drug violators will turn out to be hiding his own drug addiction.
In my bad novel, crusaders for moral values will be driven by strange obsessions. One senator's diatribe against gay marriage will link it to "man on dog" sex. Another will rant about the dangers of lesbians in high school bathrooms.
In my bad novel, the president will choose as head of homeland security a "good man" who turns out to have been the subject of an arrest warrant, who turned an apartment set aside for rescue workers into his personal love nest and who stalked at least one of his ex-lovers.
In my bad novel, a TV personality who claims to stand up for regular Americans against the elite will pay a large settlement in a sexual harassment case, in which he used his position of power to - on second thought, that story is too embarrassing even for a bad novel.
In my bad novel, apologists for the administration will charge foreign policy critics with anti-Semitism. But they will be silent when a prominent conservative declares that "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular."
. . .
Last but not least, in my bad novel the president, who portrays himself as the defender of good against evil, will preside over the widespread use of torture.
How did we find ourselves living in a bad novel? It was not ever thus. Hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels have always been with us, on both sides of the aisle. But 9/11 created an environment some liberals summarize with the acronym Iokiyar: it's O.K. if you're a Republican.
. . .
The principal objection to making Mr. Gonzales attorney general is that doing so will tell the world that America thinks it's acceptable to torture people. But his confirmation will also be a statement about ethics.
As White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales was charged with vetting Mr. Kerik. He must have realized what kind of man he was dealing with - yet he declared Mr. Kerik fit to oversee homeland security.
7:35:28 AM
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