WARS, BUDGETS, CONFIRMATIONS: But there’s time to pass a flag-burning amendment. Sigh.
UPDATE: The Anchoress doesn’t like the flag-burning amendment either: “I cannot support this amendment. I think it too is stupid. And moronic. . . . Couple years of that, and you’ll see a Democrat in the White House again before you know it.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: It’s worth linking to this post by Eugene Volokh from last year, on why this is a lousy idea.
“RIGHT-WING HACKERY” at The Economist?
ANN ALTHOUSE: “Durbin apologizing. I saw this on TV and found it … icky. What are you really crying about, Dick? Your own miserable little career?”
CONDI RICE is earning her pay.
VIRGINIA POSTREL points to this editorial by Steve Forbes on immigration policy. Forbes is right: It’s asinine.
We have the worst of all worlds in our current immigration system — it’s demeaning, unpredictable, and contemptuous toward would-be legal immigrants, while being porous toward illegals. And it’s the main experience most foreigners have of dealing with the United States government. When my Nigerian sister-in-law, before she married my brother, passed her citizenship test, my brother said he was glad that the person who swore her in was so nice, because it was the first time in the entire process that the process wasn’t run by a jerk.
This is a mess, and the Bush Administration isn’t fixing it. It should.
Sen. Durbin has finally apologized for his Guantanamo remarks. Readers trapped in Timesworld will never know that some leading Dems may have provided the straw that broke the Senator’s back (we are assuming that the mayor of Chicago still has some swing in Senator Durbin’s home state of Illinois; Mayor Daley’s criticism of Sen. Durbin did not make the Times.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times presents Sen. Durbin as the victim of insensitive Republicans. . . .
Oh, you already guessed – the Times is ignoring the comments of the Anti-Defamation League on this topic as well. Evidently, inapt use of Holocaust comparisons is not a subject of interest to Times readers. Who knew?
Read the whole thing, especially if you’ve been trapped in the NYT coccoon.
TERRY HEATON has thoughts on TV news in a post-modern world. And the folks being left behind.
“THE VAGINA MONOBLOGS:” Really, the post is worth it just for that line. But then there’s the eternal question: “How many tasteless dick jokes can I crack before a lynch mob comes knockin’?”
Judging by this guy, the answer is “rather a lot, really.”
REBECCA MACKINNON REPORTS that China is blocking all TypePad blogs.
Another reason not to buy Chinese products, I guess. Though Cisco comes in for some blame, too.
OUCH: (Via Roger Simon).
THE SKBUBBA-OUTING STORY is picked up in the Knoxville News-Sentinel. Katie Granju also has some thoughts on her pop culture blog for WBIR.
Conley’s email certainly sounded like a threat to me, but Conley may not have meant it to — which is one of the dangers of email. Judging by experience, it’s especially dangerous to sound like you’re threatening bloggers.
UPDATE: Now someone else is trying to out a blogger. Seems like bullying to me.
Somebody tell Meryl Yourish about this.
REGULATION OF ADULT WEBSITES: There’s a lot of stuff going on that I didn’t know about. I think that it’s a first amendment violation, as well as a waste of government resources.
UPDATE: Blogging IP lawyer Ron Coleman had a post on this subject last week. I’m less supportive of this legislation than he is, though I certainly note the irony that the Supreme Court seems to grant porn more First Amendment protection than it does political speech.
CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES: I guess it was only a matter of time before this happened.
DAVID HARDY has some thoughts on Supreme Court nominees and the right to bear arms.
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF EDUCATION is up!
NEW MINDS IN OLD BOTTLES: My TechCentralStation column — which is about Dan Pink’s new book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age — is up.
HIAWATHA BRAY continues to follow the Linda Foley story, which has Foley and the Newspaper Guild digging the hole deeper. Waiting out the news cycle isn’t really an option where the blogosphere is concerned, and squandering your public trust in a defensive crouch is never a good move.
If Foley keeps her job, but nobody trusts the journalism of Newspaper Guild members, that’s not a victory.
UPDATE: Trey Jackson suggests that this video will help keep things in context.
KARL ZINSMEISTER says the war is over and we won:
Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another embedded period of reporting. I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside.
Many of the soldiers I spent time with during this spring had also been deployed during the initial invasion back in 2003. Almost universally they talked to me about how much change they could see in the country. They noted progress in the attitudes of the people, in the condition of important infrastructure, in security.
This will come as news to many people. Austin Bay noted similar progress in his most recent column, but was also quite hard on the Bush Administration for not explaining what is going on with the war, and why.
UPDATE: G-Scobe thinks that Zinsmeister is being irresponsibly optimistic.
More comments on Zinsmeister here.
ANN APPLEBAUM IS WRITING ABOUT THE SMITHSONIAN, but the problem she describes goes much, much deeper than that:
Just about the only thing that the Museum of American History does not do, in fact, is teach anyone American history. That is, it doesn’t tell the whole American story, or even chunks of the American story, in chronological order, from Washington to Adams to Jefferson, or from Roosevelt to Truman to Eisenhower. When the museum was built in 1964, this sort of thing probably wasn’t necessary. But judging from a group of teenagers whom I recently heard lapse into silence when asked if they could identify Lewis and Clark, I suspect it’s now very necessary indeed.
This ties in neatly with David Gelernter’s piece from last week on the schools’ failure to teach American history. It’s a problem that isn’t really about museums.
The Cosmos solar sail is missing shortly after its launch from a Russian nuclear submarine.
The $4 million Cosmos 1 spacecraft blasted off atop a converted Russian missile at approximately 12:46 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday, but ground tracking stations failed to pick up its signal after an initial burst of data, according to mission controllers.
Cross your fingers.
JEFF JARVIS is having a bad experience with Dell. Mine has been much better.
My favourite headline last week was in the International Herald Tribune: “EU leaders and voters see paths diverge.” Traditionally in free societies, when the paths of the leaders and the voters “diverge”, it’s the leaders who depart the scene. But apparently in the EU this is too vulgar and “Anglo-Saxon”, and so the great permanent Eurocracy decided instead to offer up Euro-variations on Bertolt Brecht’s jest about the need to elect a new people. Whatever the rejection of the European constitution means, it certainly doesn’t mean the rejection of the European constitution.
Read the whole thing.
HOWARD KURTZ HAS A ROUNDUP on discussions of the difference between left and right blogs. I think a lot has to do with different purposes. As I wrote a while back:
What the September 11 attacks were to the warbloggers, though, the Democratic losses in the 2002 Congressional elections were to the left. Up to that point, though there were plenty of lefty blogs, the blogosphere tilted pretty solidly to the center-(libertarian) right.
But after that, the left worked hard to catch up. It didn’t hurt that the Democrats faced a contested primary season, which drew lots of Internet activists into the blogging fray. Between the Howard Dean campaign and the activism associated with anti-incumbency, the lefty side of the blogosphere expanded. And the character changed. When my own InstaPundit blog was newer, people sometimes wondered who would be the “InstaPundit of the left.” But what the left wanted more than punditry was activism, and sites like DailyKos are more like miniature political machines, concentrating on fundraising and get-out- the-vote efforts in a way that few right-wing sites do. Though talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt is starting to fill that niche, and no doubt others will, too, the right doesn’t have anything to match Kos this election cycle.
Since the media tilt heavily left, people on the right wanted alternative media. Since Republicans are better at grassroots organization, people on the left wanted grassroots organization. People on the left now have more political communities, while people on the right now have more freestanding pundits and alt-news sources.
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