Mr. Donohue:

The Catholic League’s request to Leah Daughtry to ban the blogs BitchPhD and Towleroad from the Democratic National Convention came as something of a shock to those of us here at Scholars and Rogues. Frankly, Mr. Donohue, we are hurt. Our offices contain no balloon figures of Jesus, with or without genitalia (you say “apparently albino penis,†I say “loincloth†– oh wait! There’s the penis! Or should it be Penis?). Our site features no links to intensely homoerotic coverage of the hottest Olympic athletes, despite insistent lobbying from at least two of our staff members. Our humble blog, unlike Daily Kos, may never become the Internet apotheosis of evil radicalism. We know our place. We are what we are.

What we are, Mr. Donohue, is a blog at least ten times as offensive to the Catholic League as the so-called “patently obscene†publications to which you so vehemently object.

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— Zhang Linsen, the 44-year-old founder of a media and graphic design company in Songjiang, China; he owns a black Hummer H2; July 28; emphasis added.

— Herve Kone, director of a group that promotes development, social justice and human rights in Burkina Faso, quoted in the Washington Post Foreign Service’s Kevin Sullivan story about the impacts of the African food crisis on women and children; July 20.
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“It would appear that not only did the Bush administration lie this nation into war and order documents forged, but they allegedly tried to plant WMD in Iraq.” Larisa Alexandrovna noted this yesterday in her post “Can’t find WMD in Iraq? Plant it?”

In the comments section I wrote:

While cable news dutifully devotes nonstop coverage to the latest random criminal cases — kidnappings, shootouts, murderous love triangles, car chases — it’s telling when a supposed break in one of the biggest manhunts in FBI history, for a terrorist who murdered and poisoned multiple American citizens with anthrax, takes a backseat to nearly every other story. That is, if it’s mentioned at all.

Even as details, leaks and a burgeoning list of questions bubbled to the surface last week, demanding serious scrutiny, the big three broadcast networks were equally blasé. Some nights skipping mention of the unfolding story altogether, as did last Tuesday’s editions of CBS Evening News and ABC World News (though both that evening reported the eminently newsworthy story of a thrill-seeking English couple who married while being strapped outside separate airplanes). On the same night, Brian Williams afforded 39 precious seconds to the anthrax investigation on NBC Nightly News. Full Story »

— Ed’s Pub patron Michael Gallardo after a 5.4-magnitude earthquake shook the Los Angeles area; July 30.
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When the Beijing Olympics begin Aug. 8, the ability to speak publicly will depend on what you say — or what you pay.

The Olympics Games have always been one of the largest possible megaphones for espousing a cause — either political or commercial. Terrorists have used it. Athletes have used it. Host nations have used it. And certainly, sellers of goods and services have used it. Be it boycott, black power or big business, the Olympics offers maximum volume for any message.

This year the early gold medal of the Politicize-the-Games Sweepstakes has gone to the Free Tibet sloganeers, although their gamesmanship was hardly challenged. The Olympic torch relay made an exceptionally easy — and highly visible through media — target for protesters. Much of the pre-Games press has focused on how well or poorly host nation China will bury pro-Tibet protests or encourage pro-China, home-team support.

But there’s far more at issue regarding speech in Beijing than proclamations for or against Tibet.
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— Svetozar Vujacic, a lawyer for Radovan Karadzic, who was “twice indicted for genocide for the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica in 1995 and for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo,” on his plans to conduct his own defense at the Hague tribunal; July 23.

— from the Presidential Advance Manual dated October 2002 used to prepare locations for visits by President Bush; emphasis added.
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Our friends over at Colorado Independent have a great new analysis up on free speech zones graveyards at the upcoming DNC. As Constitutional attorney John Whitehead explains, the Dems will be the only party this summer building a fence around open expression.

“The political cartoon is not a news story and not an oil portrait. It’s essentially a means for poking fun, for puncturing pomposity. Cartooning is an irreverent form of expression, and one particularly suited to scoffing at the high and the mighty.”

Even an unrepentant smartass (ahem) can grasp the nuances of the controversy over David Remnick’s unfortunate choice of a certain political cartoon as cover art for the July 21^st issue of The New Yorker. However, amid the flurry of accusations and defenses – racist, anti-racist, inappropriate (a milquetoast catchall and a perpetual irritant), too easy to misinterpret, impossible to misunderstand, bad taste, protected speech, not funny – one criticism resonates with me as perhaps more of a fundamental issue than many realize.

It’s bad satire. It doesn’t work.

The reasons for its failure have very little to do with its potentially explosive subject and almost everything to do with some basic tenets of art in general and editorial cartooning in particular.

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Jesse Helms is dead. He is, as somewhere in the ether a greater mind than his may be noting with some glee , consigned to “the dust bin of history.” And I, a native North Carolinian, say with the same sense of satisfaction Montressor had after walling his enemy Fortunato inside the catacombs, “in pace requiescat.”

But I owe Jesse Helms a debt of the literary variety - and today I repay it.

In the autumn of 1966 I was a 14 year old 9th grader. I was besotted with The Beatles and played my guitar at least 3 hours a night. I had been a straight “A” student throughout my academic career, but that was slipping away as I focused on the gospel of John and Paul with the zeal of the true believer. Full Story »

On the heels of news that millions of American flags are actually imported from China, Republican presidential nominee John McCain addressed the issue this Fourth of July morning outside a flag factory in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

“All options must be on the table to deal with China’s infiltration of our flag market,” McCain said to a cheering and U.S.-made flag-waving crowd. “If we find that China manufactured and sold us these millions of American flags intentionally and for the purpose of tainting our great country in any way, we might have no other option than to bomb these Chinese flag production sites and trade routes, their business associates, and their friends and family.”

McCain went on to declare, “My friends, our flag is all we have. I’ll say this to you as plainly as possible - if an American flag and a baby were on fire, you have my solemn word I wouldn’t think of coming to that baby’s aid until every last ember was extinguished from Old Glory. My friends, babies of course come and go, but our forefathers fought and died to preserve that flag, and” - pounding the podium - “I will not stand by while the Chinese sell millions of them to us through their handiwork and our mutual trade deals!” Full Story »

On Tuesday night, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and Newshour with Jim Lehrer presented two telling examples of how omitting information shapes public perception with regard to civilian casualties.

With Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, Williams explored the possible outcome of a U.S. or Israeli strike against Iran:

— from the Declaration of Independence; July 4, 1776.

In 2004, Yahoo turned over user information to the Chinese government that was used to track down a dissident journalist, Shi Tao, and send him to a labour camp. It was the moment that the Internet knew sin.

Now, Judge Louis Stanton has decided to force Google/YouTube to disclose a complete set of data on all YouTube users. As TechCrunch reports: “That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.— Full Story »

— George Carlin, who died early this week at age 71; June 23
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Expect the average net worth of a member of Congress — now about $1.5 million — to take another leap upward. That’s because five members of the Supreme Court decided that wealth, as speech, cannot be regulated. In doing so, the Roberts court continued to dismantle the “fairness” logic of past congressional attempts at campaign finance reform by labeling such reforms as censorship.

In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to allow candidates facing self-financing, wealthy opponents to accept larger-than-normal contributions. This decision will decrease the number of financially viable congressional candidates.
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Short-sighted bloggers are calling for a boycott of the Associated Press because it deigned to define for bloggers with an overly heavy hand clear standards as to how much of its content they can excerpt without infringing on the AP’s copyright.

Such boycott talk misunderstands the AP and its journalistic breadth if not depth, and amounts, frankly, to pure hissyfits ’cause some bloggers can’t have their way.

How, exactly, does one boycott the almost omnipresent AP? And what would replace it? Reuters? Hardly.
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Though the media did report this week that rap mogul P. Diddy changed his name back to Puff Daddy, its coverage was far too limited for such a newsworthy event.

To be fair, it was a busy news week. And we do commend the media for tackling the other stories that affect Americans and the world most: a pig wearing boots, foreigners trying to buy Budweiser’s brewer, Hulk Hogan’s wife dating a 19-year-old , a federal judge caught posting sexually explicit photos on his website, the sighting of a one-horned deer, how Preparation H shrinks love handles, why NYC is seeking more visas for hot foreign models, a pregnant male sea dragon, the scourge of “momnesia”, an eight-limbed girl, scientists gone wild, and the groundbreaking study that found women in bikinis make men more impulsive. Full Story »