THE SIEGE OF AIN EBEL: More reporting from Lebanon by Michael Totten.
Archive for 2007
January 12, 2007
MIKE NIFONG WANTS OUT.
UPDATE: From former prosecutor Randy Barnett, a related post on prosecutorial misconduct.
DEMOCRATS DEBATE THEMSELVES ON THE SURGE: At Ham Nation. I like the Pop-Up Video approach.
HARRY REID seems to have given up the fight against earmark reform in the Senate.
STREET PHONE-CHARGING BOOTHS in Uganda. Pretty cool improvised tech. (Via BoingBoing).
I DIDN’T COVER THE ADULT ENTERTAINMENT EXPO that was going on in Las Vegas at the same time as CES. But Wired’s Regina Lynn did, so you can read her report and see what I missed.
OUR MITT ROMNEY PODCAST managed to get picked up on NPR, too. Romney got good mileage out of that — and so did we!
UPDATE: A Larry King analogy. I can live with that.
ARS TECHNICA says that some people think that DRM is dying, but that Apple may be DRM’s best friend:
Apple stands to benefit greatly by keeping the FairPlay DRM system up and running. The lock-in afforded by FairPlay creates an Apple ecosystem that essentially ties the iPod to iTunes and to Apple, at least for commercial transactions. Someone has even launched an antitrust suit against Apple over this, though the suit’s specific claims are rather broad.
The symbiotic relationship between iTunes and the iPod has been so profitable for Apple that Microsoft has blatantly ripped it off for its new Zune music player. Apple has managed to create an ecosystem populated with high-margin devices; the company’s overall gross margins are nearly 30 percent, and so even if iTunes were used solely to drive sales of iPods, it would be worth it for Apple to run the store.
Apple has, in an important sense, become a digital gatekeeper for media companies; iTunes is the best way to reach consumers with music, movies, podcasts, and television. Content companies have paid close attention to the success of iTunes; they’ve seen how it saved The Office, pushed billions of dollars in revenue to Disney, and established itself as such a de facto standard on college campuses that students would rather use iTunes than free alternatives. The content companies now need Jobs & Co. as much as Apple needs them.
That’s good for Jobs, but I’m not sure I like it.
A CITIZEN’S ARREST BY PAUL HACKETT: A pro-gun anti-crime Democrat — I’m surprised the party didn’t get behind him.
A REYES TROOP SURGE FLIPFLOP: You’d think it was all about politics or something.
LORENTZ & FITZGERALD, CALL YOUR OFFICE!
So while the House has been in session for almost 48 hours since the 110th Congress was sworn in Jan. 4, the clock on Pelosi’s Web site says only 17 hours 48 minutes have elapsed.
“We’re just counting the legislative hours,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill explained.
Okay, more than relativistic travel, this actually makes me think of Jason Leopold’s “24 business hours” Rove-indictment timetable. Let’s hope the Democrats do better than Leopold did.
THE TOP TEN BLOG STORIES of 2006.
ROMNEY USES AN ARMY OF DAVIDS: That’s Dean Barnett’s take on the Romney fundraising approach.
Romney’s had a good week, and has even managed to not merely neutralize a new-media attack, but to turn it to his advantage. However, his answers to my Second Amendment / Gun Rights questions were not especially strong, and if I were advising him I’d suggest that he strengthen that aspect of his spiel. In light of his record in Massachusetts, it’s a weak point, and one that he hasn’t fully addressed. My email suggests that a lot of people felt that way.
Meanwhile it’s interesting to contrast Romney’s success with this report on the GOP’s online weaknesses.
“DEMOCRATS FUMBLE EARMARKS LEGISLATION:” This AP story has got to hurt.
IN THE MAIL: Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION UPDATE:
On Wednesday, the House voted to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour.
The bill also extends for the first time the federal minimum wage to the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. However, it exempts American Samoa, another Pacific island territory that would become the only U.S. territory not subject to federal minimum-wage laws.
One of the biggest opponents of the federal minimum wage in Samoa is StarKist Tuna, which owns one of the two packing plants that together employ more than 5,000 Samoans, or nearly 75 percent of the island’s work force. StarKist’s parent company, Del Monte Corp., has headquarters in San Francisco, which is represented by Mrs. Pelosi.
Jeez.
UPDATE: Lance emails:
When I was reading the story on American Samoa, it occurred to me that the irony is that if the minimum wage makes sense, it is precisely in those cases where an isolated market dominated by one or two employers in the same industry leads to wages being held down and where the resulting higher profits are not reinvested in that isolated local economy. American Samoa is a case study. 75% of the local workforce!
Anyway, here was my take.
Good point. [LATER: It said “Lance Frizzell” before, but that was my mistake — I suffered from a blogger-confusion brain-burp and got my blogging Lances mixed up.]
VIDEO: Miraculously surviving a terrorist attack in Madrid.
ATTACK ON THE U.S. EMBASSY IN ATHENS: Pajamas Media has a roundup.
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: A look at this week’s Earmark Entertainment:
To Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s credit, House Democrats recently passed ethics legislation that included provisions making earmarks more transparent. The House bill included a broad definition of earmarks, thereby making it harder to hide them in, say, last-minute conference reports. It also requires Members to file a public disclosure form when they request an earmark, and to state that neither they nor their spouses will financially benefit. It’s hard to argue that this is anything but elementary good government.
Unless you are Harry Reid. The ethics reform offered by Senate Democrats contained none of these tougher earmark provisions. So Senate Republicans, led by South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, cheekily took the identical language of the House earmark bill and offered it as an amendment to the Senate version. Numerous Democrats instantly denounced it, apparently unaware (or unconcerned) that the language had been sponsored by Ms. Pelosi.
Democrat Dick Durbin then moved to table the amendment, though he lost by 51 to 46. Of the 46 Senators who voted to banish Ms. Pelosi’s reform, 38 of them were her fellow Democrats. The seven Republicans who went along with Mr. Reid included some of the GOP’s biggest spenders (Trent Lott) and Members of the Appropriations Committee, aka Earmark Central Station. When Senator DeMint then moved to have his amendment accepted by voice vote — which is customary — Mr. Durbin objected. The effect of these procedural run-arounds was to give Mr. Reid more time to twist a few more Democratic arms into killing earmark reform.
By our deadline last night, he still hadn’t succeeded, though Senate sources told us that Mr. Reid was considering filing for cloture on the entire ethics bill, thereby foreclosing a vote on the current DeMint amendment. If he prevails, voters will know just much “fiscal discipline” to expect from the new majority.
Reid is a poor frontman for a campaign against the “culture of corruption.”
THE MEDIA SCRIPT: Reader Gary Casteel emails:
Why don’t you ponder the media focus on the Duke lacrosse rape case compared to the media focus on the recent sadistic murder of the young Knoxville couple?
It was not a carjacking, it was a hate crime pure and simple. What’s been released to the public clearly indicates that it was a hate crime.
If the young couple had been black and the suspects white can you imagine the media attention, both local, and of course national? Why do local authorities continue to call this a “carjacking”?
Well, “hate crime” goes to motivation and I’m not so sure that there was a racial motivation here — and I don’t really like the “hate crime” concept anyway. Murder is murder either way. And the story’s bad enough without that:
Investigators believe Channon Christian and her boyfriend were carjacked and she was held hostage and raped repeatedly for days before her death, a federal marshal said Thursday.
Details of the slayings surfaced on the same day authorities captured three men sought for questioning in the killings of Christian and her boyfriend, Christopher Newsom.
That said, it’s certainly true that if the races were reversed the media would be employing an irrebuttable presumption that it was a hate crime. This double standard, though, is actually unfair to blacks, assuming that horrific crimes by white people must be motivated by something special, like racial hatred, while similar crimes by black people are just par for the course. Like so many of those double standards, it manages to be racist in both directions at once.
As we get wealthier, we also become enhanced physically, cognitively, and morally, leading to a virtuous cycle of improvements to the standard of living. As the economy improves, human cognitive ability and moral reasoning improves, which helps markets to work better and makes the process of innovation more productive, leading to greater wealth, more mental and moral development, and so on. . . .
In the study of history, the importance of mankind’s mental and moral development has often been overlooked. My guess is that the rate of mental and moral development will accelerate sharply over the next few decades, and the phenomenon will be more widely noticed and its significance better appreciated.
A virtuous circle? Bring it on!
MICKEY KAUS DEFENDS GM:
This is a common viewpoint, I’ve found, among my Democratic friends–Jon Alter, this means you!–who would never actually buy a Detroit product but who want to believe the UAW can’t be blamed. The argument seems to be roughly this: a) American cars are now reliable enough, having closed the gap with the Japanese brands, so b) the workers are doing their job; therefore c) if Detroit cars like the G6 are still obviously inferior–tacky and cheap, with mediocre handling–it must be because they’re designed badly by white collar professionals, not because they’re built badly by blue collar union members.
The trouble with this comforting liberal argument is labor costs. When Kuttner says “Japanese total labor costs are comparable, even with Detroit’s higher health insurance costs,” he is–as is so often the case–talking through his hat.
Read the whole thing.
January 11, 2007
UNREST in Bangladesh.
THE NEW IPHONE: Not as exciting as knitting.