bill:politics

Beautiful, heartaching, swinging country version by the Burns Sisters of Little Steven’s I am a Patriot provides the soundtrack for a video view of last summer’s Cindy Sheehan-led peace protests in Crawford, Texas. The song is so appropriate and never more so than when Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are giving speeches claiming that people like me, who disagree with their tactics and policies, are either traitors or providing sustenance to the terrorists. As if their oh so precious Bible were not the only document they possess written down by man but whispered by their Almighty!

(Tech note: I initially attempted to embed the video in this post for your convenience but despite trying a couple of WordPress plugins couldn’t make it work; the fault is mine, I’m sure, and not the plugin authors’.)

Though I ought to expect crap like this, I’m still surprised when the Bush Administration pulls stunts like putting a journalist in jail for refusing to give up videotape he made of a protest last summer in San Francisco. The guy was blogging right up until the court hearing from whence he was sent to the stir.

Really unbelievable and yet a totally transparent ploy. California law protects the press so–on the flimsiest of connective tissue–the fact that the SFPD gets federal funding, the Justice Department jumped in and brought the case in federal court. Of course the judge had to go along with it and he did.

The other question I have is whether the major media outlets will jump on Wolff’s story as they did in the celebrated Judith Miller fiasco. Coverage by the local daily is not the same, but we need to hold the government accountable for yet another board in our fence of rights pulled away.

Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress. I agree with the aims and tactics, so I added the campaign awareness widget on the top of the sidebar. For a much better explanation of what this is all about than I can offer, read Rebecca Blood’s post China, the Internet & Human Rights - a long analysis.

President Bush does it again, saying newspaper reports on the Administration’s use of bank data was “disgraceful.” Cheney called out the New York Times by name in a speech. Because of course these people are always right, never violate any laws or the Constitution and are allowed to do whatever they choose to protect us from nasty terrorists.

I’m not saying this particular program is illegal, unconstitutional, doesn’t work or won’t help. That’s not the point. Comments like these from our top two ‘elected’ officials alone are sad signs of the times, when freedom of the press is being attacked more often than is our nation.

Far worse, though, is the ignorant, fascist call by Republican congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, who called on the attorney general to investigate whether The Times’s decision to publish the article violated the Espionage Act. In an interview Sunday, King described the disclosure as “absolutely disgraceful” and said he believed that the newspaper’s action had violated the statute.

How can a person of such high office even think this is possibly true? Sometimes I think the current crew slept (or ws stoned) through the entire Nixon episode. If the Supreme Court, which was much more rational in those days, refused to halt the publication of the Pentagon Papers I thought the days when politicians tried to stiffle and censor were essentially through.

Tragically, not.

The US Supreme Court decided today that government employees give up free speech when they accept their job. Specifically, federal employees lose the ability to expose wrongdoing (i.e., whistleblowing). We can thank new Justice Antonin Scalia, the difference from a very similar decision last year in which sadly departed Sandra Day O’Connor was the fifth vote for the side of freedom. We best get used to this, slip side, slip side.

Scoble does stand up against the Microsoft Machine on the censorship of Michael Anti though his response in the comments is underwhelming. Unlike apparent official blog spokesperson Michael Connolly, product unit manager for MSN Spaces, who gives a mealymouthed explanation of Microsoft’s position of why the company took down this pro-China democracy blog.

This is a tough issue which both Google and Yahoo have previously faced and also handled poorly, not to point the finger only at MSFT. It’s one which we need to find a better answer as a culture; as one of Scoble’s commenters said, why are we fighting for democracy in the Middle East but allowing US-flagged corporations to toss it aside as they like elswhere?
[cross-posted]

1/5/06: InformationWeek has the official Microsoft response. Still weak.

The Mercury News asked readers to write in with made up words where only one letter is changed from a real word to give a very different meaning. I took up the challenge but somehow my little gem was not selected for print:

In our madly consumerist American society good price is nearly everything. Nothing affirms this more than the massive success of Wal-Mart and the way in which it’s ridden ever-lower prices to greater and greater share of retail spending. Yesterday, the year’s pagan shopping holiday known as Black Friday, at our local house of worship shoppers were so anxious to save $22 off an admittedly already low price of $400 for an HP notebook PC they nearly rioted in efforts to claim one of the slim supply.

People raced to the consumer electronics department as the store opened at 5 a.m., jumping over counters and pushing over a display case. Store managers, downplaying the scrum afterwards, needed help from Mountain View PD to restore order. Mothers were overheard berating their 10 year old sons for not being aggressive enough and so missing out on the day’s big bargain. And, as Rogers writes, this wasn’t an isolated incident.

Really, though, are these rapacious consumers to blame? Obviously not from this sideline view or I’d not be writing this. No, to me this is a case of Wal-Mart and the supporting squads of advertisers and media partners stoking the acquisitive fires with barrages of commercials and planted news pieces.

A perfect example just came on while we’re watching Mad TV, the three ladies from Destiny’s Child pretending to celebrate Christmas with their families. These women are all worth many millions so for them passing out all kinds of expensive consumer electronics is a trivial expense. For the group’s biggest fans, who tend to be between 10 and 25 years old, plasma TVs, digital cameras and laptop computers are extremely costly, but mostly paid for by parents after rounds of extreme begging. Somehow I doubt Beyonce worries about that.

But back to the Mountain View Almost-Riot. Wal-Mart and its competitors pour out the hype and create an atmosphere where getting to the sales becomes a sporting event. The prize, of course, is being allowed to hand over as much of your cash as possible as long as you have the chance to walk out the door with the day’s best deals. Americans love to compete, there’s no other culture with so many awards and top 10/100 lists as us, but these sales days are different because usually the average American has no chance to win.

The stores really take it to the next level and Wal-Mart has got to be about the best at this part. Usually stores are required to have sufficient supply on hand to meet reasonably expected demand, which is why auto commercials are so explicit about specifying the VINs, and otherwise hand out rainchecks. Somehow Wal-Mart (and Fry’s Electronics!) gets away with blatantly violating this aspect of consumer protection laws because if they brought in anywhere near enough of the ‘big deal’ items like the HP notebooks there’d be no need to crush little kids to get one. I’m sure a lawyer will explain Wal-Mart abides by regulations by squeezing qualifiers in the small print.

Too bad parents can’t answer their kids’ screaming with the small kind of print. Maybe they can explain that not everyone makes it to the pros.

Jacob Appelbaum is on the ground in Houston trying to open the flow of information to and from Katrina evacuees but running into sizable giovernment roadblocks. Sad but hardly surprising. I met Jake at BarCamp, this guy is scary smart and uses his deep knowledge of networks (and their vulnerabilities) in combination with his political skills in ways I cannot pretend to even consider. He’s constantly trying to get into places where information is being walled in, or out, and change that–just before BarCamp he’d returned from four months in Iraq where he was constantly hassled, detained and blocaded by American forces.

CBS News is reporting Anti-War Mom Opposition Mounting, that people are objecting to Cindy Sheehan’s message that President Bush should be honest with Americans and pull our troops out of Iraq; one local TV station refused to air a (paid) commercial featuring Sheehan because the message “could very well be offensive to our community in Utah.” The President is traveling to Salt Lake City tomorrow to speak to a VFW convention and Rocky Anderson, the city’s mayor is calling for a huge anti-war demonstration, causing one local VFW post officer to call Anderson unpatriotic.

I’d really like to understand the logic behind the position of these Bush supporters. American soldiers have sacrificed and died in Iraq and, if I get what they’re saying, to withdraw now without accomplishing the mission than we’d be disrespecting our military. My question is why rethinking our efforts in light of new information in any way shows disrespect or ingratitude towards the people in uniform, especially those who’ve given their life in Iraq. The pattern of behavior, that government decisions must be the best and any disagreement is unpatriotic and wrong, has been repeated constantly in America and other nations; I thought after Vietnam we might learn the lesson that critical debate and dissent makes us stronger but sadly this is not so.

If continuing analysis of the true situation on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere concludes that the use of force is the best practical option to reach our goals, then America should use it regardless of opposition at home or abroad. I do want to be clear that I’m not objecting on, say, a general pacifist principal. I do object to the actions of those who’d be the first to scream about any infringement of, say, the Second Amendment but want to curtail the First Amendment rights of Cindy Sheehan, Rocky Anderson or myself to debate, question and even insult the policy decisions of the Bush Administration.

For me, the best thing we can do, for ourselves and our loved ones, is to make decisions that offer the highest probability that fewer horrific sacrifices–American or Iraqi–will happen from today on and that increase the likelihood of stable, less belligerent governments and populace in the region. The idea that even one more person should be put at risk unnecessarily, through unquestioned obedience to authority is precisely what many Americans claim as a major defect of non-domocratic countries. Attempts to stifle policy discussions through ad hominem personal attacks and rhetorical shortcuts are actually far worse insults to the memory of the servicemen and women dead, maimed and disabled.

Jason Shellen, leader of the Blogger team at Google, takes offense at CNet’s publication of some of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s trivial personal data and suggests that his company is justified in putting CNet in the penalty box for a year. Jason’s blog doesn’t have trackback, so here’s a copy of the comment I left there. [via JeremyZ]

Sorry Jason but I think your response is off base. If the CNet reporter had published embarrasing information about individual contributors rather than well-known information about the company CEO I might–might–agree with you but Schmidt’s stock holdings and that bit of political activity are/were reported in the business section of the Mercury News.

The bigger point, which you’re deflecting entirely, is that Google provides the tools to do such searches. The tools are so good, so easy, that finding personal information has become trivial. So to have your firm respond by shunning a news org for pointing it out is both bad and absurd.

As a comparable example look at the highly-acclaimed ChicagoCrime app built on top of Google Maps. Here you have someone showing the exact locations where crimes occured. How hard would it be for a motivated individual to take the next step and instead of using the police reports to show where the crimes happened, the Megan’s Law database of sex offenders was used?

Would that be a good use of Google technology? I’m not sure but it would certainly be far more invasive. So tell me again, is Google justified in shutting out a media org for using Google’s own tools?

In the new (September) issue of Analog, Stan Schmidt’s editorial looks at the way our (American) perception of freedom has changed in the last twenty years or so, framing it as looking at an airport terminal through a time viewer in 1985. The carry on and body searches, frequently multiple requests to show IDs, the occasional machine gun toting security are all clues our 1985 selves would have used to identify the scene as most likely being Eastern European.

Further, Schmidt cites the proliferation of blogs written by parents about their babies, nannycams and automated workplace monitoring of staff computers as further evidence of semi-unconscious movement towards an Orwellian existence. Each step, he writes, is justified as a necessary, possibly temporary, response to a specific event such as 9/11.

Reading this in the wake of Thursday’s London bombs reinforced my belief that our leadership is taking the easy and self-interested path rather than making choices that strengthen our country and our future. For example, forget about the rationale for the invasion of Iraq and whether the Administration lied to justify it; instead, look at the companies making huge profits from the decision. More difficult choices like securing the ports where millions of cargo containers are shipped in annually and funding emergency development of new energy sources to remove dependence on foreign (and, of course, rapidly depleting) sources are given crumbs as superficial cover.

The signpost of this entry’s title is a column published today by Michael Kinsley, Right Principle, Wrong Context. In it Kinsley states that the NY Times is wrong in asserting a nearly absolute vision of freedom of the press with any exceptions left to the decision of the editors of the media organization concerned. Instead, Kinsley agrees with Time Inc. Editor in Chief Norman Perlstein’s explanation of his decision to comply with the subpoena for Matt Cooper’s testimony in the Valerie Plame case.

Again, many observers might agree with the justification for change in this particular freedom. Why should journalists be allowed to ignore Supreme Court decisions when it suits them? I find the question interesting when so many of the same people exclaim, any time the subject comes up, that the Second Amendment is a sacred and inviolable principal that can never be interpreted to allow even the least restriction on the right to own guns of any sort, when the First Amendment to that same great document says that “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

So, again, a conflict arises between higher principal and immedate interest and the needs of the moment are judged to be greater. Recognized or not, the tragedy of the commons plays out on such macro scales too.

There’s another campaign to amend the Constitution to make flag burning illegal. But this is wrong on several levels and one can only hope enough Americans realize this and act on it. For starters, burning is the proper way to dispose of an old flag. Of course the flag is supposed to be treated with respect and ceremony and that’s not how a flag being burned as a protest is treated. Still, if the burning is removed as the objection then what’s left is a question of free speech. That’s the objection of at least of of the more vehement supporters of the proposed amendment and of course exactly why we should vote against it.

As Dave said, the possibility that MSNBC/PBS analyst Lawrence O’Donnell has revealed the source of Valerie Plame’s name–GWB puppetmaster Karl Rove–is so good my first reaction is that it can’t be right. My second is people in this country are so dug into partisan positions that the coming battle will make Watergate seem like a Sunday BBQ with those annoying cousins; Doc says bloggers are already going nuts.

As an aside: A friend in Florida mentioned this afternoon that rumors there have Jeb Bush preparing a run to succeed his brother. After his absurd actions during and after the Terry Schiavo mess, I didn’t believe his candidacy would be a winner but if this report proves out and turns into the storm of storms the Jeb might as well sit back. By 2012 or 2016 any remaining effect will likely be minimal.

Karl Rove could shortcircuit all of this by falling on his sword; his internal calculator might well give him this answer.

[Note that this in no way changes my call to Boycott CNN]

So the Supremes spoke, or rather didn’t, refusing to take up the appeal of the NY Times, Time and their respective writers who refused to cooperate with a prosecutor investigating the leak of Valerie Plume Plame’s name. I guess First Amendment yada yada yada, though (sadly) if the court were to even tread timorously on the next one on that page there’d be an uproar that would put the biggest protests of the ’60s to shame.

The reporter who should be facing the worst of the heat, the guy who actually published Plame’s name despite knowing how terrible that would be for her (and for our country too), Robert Novak seems to be sitting back and relaxing. Still refuses to say word one about the farce except that he’ll “write a column when the case is closed” and “tell everything I know.”

The NY Times has hung tough, supporting their reporter and taking whatever heat the idiots in the prosecutor’s office has been dishing. Time Warner, not so much. The companies executives have decided to cave and will turn over Matt Cooper’s notes and other work product. Norman Pearlstine, Editor in Chief of Time Inc., after a few opening lines of a fluff job, said:

Many other media companies have faced the same decision. Not within living memory, says the NY Times, has one pushed over their hand and cooperated with a government investigation or civil lawsuit. But the management at Time Warner, in absolutely perfect lockstep with their corporate contemporaries, has put press freedom aside in favor of protecting their balance sheet.

Further, TW cable channel CNN has kept Robert Novak on their payroll and on their shows. If any journalist should pay a price for this travesty it is Novak but if anything he’s had something of a rise in the last year. While the CNN show he co-hosted, Crossfire, was canceled, that’s more attributable to ratings and, well, because the show was crap.

Hence my call for all of you who truly believe in this country, its values and potential, and that without free journalism, good and bad, we are all devalued: Boycott CNN, Time Magazine and the other journalistic efforts of Time Warner!

This idea is cropping up all over but so far it leaves me pretty cold. Three examples: Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, BlueHereNow’s NowPublic and WikiPedia offshoot WikiNews. Each takes a different approach to breaking the corporate stranglehold on newsreporting but all expect individuals to publish content to their site with little compensation except a vague good feeling.

Why we should do so is puzzling to me. I draw a distinction from other ‘open’ systems gaining momentum, like WikiPedia itself, software projects such as Linux, Apache and PHP, and classic literature publisher Project Gutenberg. These projects have an enduring quality that news does not and for the most part aggregating personal blogs can serve much the same purpose while leaving material in control of the authors.

Especially as the three listed projects in my opening paragraph are either commercial companies or run advertising. So, for instance, Dan wants to build a new business but for now is keeping the revenue model to himself and his investors. Hmm.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (and how hard it is to type those four words together!) said a couple of days ago he isn’t planning to prosecute Mark Felt for his Deep Throat work 33 years ago. How stupid must I be for thinking the statute of limitations should have run out around 30 years ago.

Of course that surely wasn’t the Administration’s intent in making the announcement–this was a warning shot across the bow of anyone thinking of becoming this generation’s version. We can only hope some brave individual ignores the Rovian machine and takes the risk if (and I have no knowledge) crimes have been committed. One might think the Valerie Plume Plame affair, the nasty business at Abu Ghraib and Guantanmo, and the secret renditions of the CIA et al would qualify.

tecosystems: Wikipedia and the Next Pandemic. Doctors using Wikipedia to bypass attempts by foolish government bureaucrats to limit information flow.