Archive for 2006

ALITO UPDATE: The New York Times editorial on Alito draws commentary from Ann Althouse and Keith Burgess-Jackson.

My position: I think that unlike Harriet Miers, Alito is clearly qualified. He’ll probably be a good justice, but he certainly isn’t my personal top choice. So if I’ve seemed unexcited here, it’s because I am. Not opposed, or anything. Just unexcited.

UPDATE: I don’t think that Senator Bernie Sanders will be much of a force in the confirmation hearings. If he is, it’ll be the first time something like that has happened since the Goldwater presidency . . . .

And Professor Bainbridge has much more on the NYT editorial.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Read this post from TigerHawk, too.

BLOGGING AND LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP: Interesting account of an AALS panel on the subject.

The risk of distraction is certainly real, though it’s perhaps overrated — at least, plenty of people are equally distracted by email lists, public-service activities, political activism, etc. I think you’re better focusing on outputs, making sure your scholarship and teaching are progressing. Then you can use your spare time for blogging or whatever. It’s the pickle-jar theory of time management, and it works. Start with the big things, and you’ve got room for the little ones. Try to do it in the reverse order and you’re screwed. At least that’s how it works for me.

As for junior faculty worrying that their blogging may cost them tenure, well, it might — but if you’re seriously worried about that, it’s probably a sign that your school has a major problem in the way of intellectual openness, and you should probably be thinking about going somewhere else.

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Christine Hurt weighs in on the women and blogging question.

MORE: Much more here and here. Both are must-reads, with links to lots of other posts.

JACK ABRAMOFF was a very busy man.

UPDATE: Read this post from Marc Cooper, too.

michellemalkin.jpgPODCASTING COMES TO INSTAPUNDIT: This was actually Helen’s idea, and with the book done I finally had some time. The first InstaPundit/Dr. Helen podcast is online, and you can play it by clicking here.

Today’s episode features an interview with blogger Michelle Malkin, talking about her book Unhinged, her life as a blogger, the Washington Post and the Bill Roggio affair, the Condi Rice presidency, and whether she plans to follow in the footsteps of Wonkette.

Also, a musical interview with Audra Coldiron, of Audra and the Antidote, about how the Internet makes it possible to be a mother, a musician, and a web designer, plus how her high school horrors led to adult creativity, and a surprising enthusiasm for homeschooling.

If you want to subscribe, the RSS 2.0 feed is here. (It’s also in the right-hand column). Just copy the link and paste it into your podcast-listening software; then you’ll get new episodes automatically.

If you’ve got suggestions for future shows, drop ’em in the comments over at Helen’s blog — she’s the producer.

UPDATE: I guess podcasting is inherently unconservative. That’s okay!

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HELEN’S HEART T-SHIRT is mentioned in a story in the Chicago Tribune about the medical t-shirt company MedTees.com, run by Northwestern cardiologist Wes Fisher. Excerpt:

The MedTees T-shirts are the brainchild of Evanston Northwestern physician Wes Fisher and his wife, Diane. Fed up with a culture that they say resists the natural processes of aging and illness like leprosy, the Fishers’ idea allows patients and people with illnesses to poke fun at their ailments.

“It’s kind of a countercultural idea,” Wes Fisher said in the kitchen of his home. “People in Western culture really don’t think it’s OK to have an illness or be sick. We have a media image of the perfect body.”

The MedTees site has a number of different t-shirts, but they’re happy to get suggestions for new ones. And Fisher has a blog, too.

HOWARD DEAN AND SAM ALITO: A musical dialogue.

WORRYING ABOUT POLYGAMY: There’s been a lot of that on the right lately, much of it tied to questions of whether polygamy is being used to “normalize” gay marriage, or the reverse.

There’s a pretty good argument that polygamy is usually bad for the societies it appears in, producing a large surplus of sullen, unmarriageable young men. On the other hand, those are usually societies in which women, especially — but men, too — are mostly poor and uneducated. If polygamy were ever to become popular in the United States, which seems unlikely to me, I doubt it would look much like polygamy in, say, Mali.

I’m occasionally amused by the implication that there’s something unnatural about polygamy, though: It’s quite possibly the most common form of marriage in human society, and certainly far too common to dismiss as some sort of perversion. (Heck, read your Old Testament). But I think that most of the polygamy-talk now is just a symptom of the gay-marriage debate, rather than a genuine freestanding concern.

The solution to all of this, of course, is to separate marriage and state. There’s no reason why the government should be involved in this sort of thing (the origin of Tennessee’s statute requiring marriage licenses, it turns out, was a desire to ensure that county clerks got fees, not exactly an overwhelming justification) and there’s no reason why people’s private living arrangements should be part of public debate. That’s my take, anyway.

RON BAILEY: “Has science become politicized? A better question might be: When has it ever not been?”

THIS SOUNDS COOL: “The SkyScout is a revolutionary, one of a kind, patented handheld device that instantly identifies and/or locates any celestial object visible to the naked eye, providing educational and entertaining information, both in text and audio.” Thanks to reader Paul Music for the link.

THE WASHINGTON POST has done the grudging minimum by running a correction on its Bill Roggio coverage. But while the correction notes that the story by Doug Struck and Jonathan Finer got the facts wrong, it doesn’t make clear that those factual errors undermine the point of the story, which was an effort to paint Roggio as a stooge of the military/blogosphere complex.

Bill has more thoughts on the subject here.

MAYBE THE ARMY is catching on to this whole blog thing after all.

LOTS OF BAD PRESS FOR MICROSOFT over its shutdown of a Chinese blogger.

AVIAN FLU UPDATE:

THE number of Turkish people thought to be infected with avian flu rose to more than 50 this weekend, prompting concern that the disease may be about to spread into Europe.

Yesterday a British laboratory confirmed that a Turkish brother and sister who died last week had the feared H5N1 strain of avian flu.

A third child from the same family in Dogubayazit, in eastern Turkey, has now died of avian flu and dozens more suspected cases have emerged.

“The laboratory in the UK said that they have detected H5N1 in samples of the two fatal cases,” said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organisation. They are the first fatalities outside East Asia.

Read the whole thing. There’s this, too: “Professor John Oxford, an expert on flu at Queen Mary’s medical school, London, said the most worrying aspect of the deaths in Turkey was the large number of human cases resulting from exposure to a small number of birds.”

JAMES LILEKS: “I do not worry about libertinism. I worry about libertines who think the greatest threat to the imminent Utopia is a Wal-Mart exec who refuses to stock a CD because the lyrics celebrate shooting cops in the head, or who think that uptight repressed Christers are six inches and five days away from replacing the Constitution with the plot of ‘A Handmaiden’s Tale.'”

This thinking betrays a certain lack of perspective.

UPDATE: Hey, look who else is worried about “extremist Christians” — like Hugh Hewitt!

ANN ALTHOUSE: “The question is: Are you concerned, in a politically neutral way, about national security?”

TENNCARE BUZZ: A three-year-old song on TennCare by my friend (and former bandmate) Todd Steed is getting some airplay and ruffling some feathers: Story (and TV report) here — hear the song online here.

UPDATE: You can get the song on iTunes, too, along with the whole album “Knoxville Tells.” And the new one, “Heartbreak and Duct Tape.”

TOM DELAY will quit his post as Majority Leader, according to the AP. I think that’s good for the GOP, and for the country.

UPDATE: The Hotline Blog is asking for your thoughts on who should replace DeLay.

STEPHEN SPRUIELL at the National Review Media blog wonders if Bill Roggio’s mistreatment by the Washington Post wasn’t part of a trend:

The theme here, if you haven’t already picked up on it, is that two major papers have used recent news reports about U.S. military information operations to try to discredit a pro-U.S. analyst and a pro-U.S. blogger. Both Rubin and Roggio write from a standpoint that is generally supportive of the U.S. mission in Iraq, and the NY Times and the Washington Post have attempted to portray their writings as untrustworthy and potentially motivated by financial considerations.

I think this has something to do with the fear and contempt some newspaper reporters feel towards online analysts and bloggers who don’t buy into the objective model of journalism and are nevertheless taking a growing share of the news and analysis market. Writers like Rubin and Roggio, who have both traveled to Iraq and used the Internet to report their findings, are challenging the traditional gatekeeper role of papers like the Times and the Post, and some at those institutions don’t like it. As true believers in the old school of objective reporting, they’re seeking to discredit this new school of journalism — which has a clear point of view about its subject matter — as nothing but pro-U.S. propaganda.

But accuracy, fairness and honesty should count for a lot more than “objectivity,” to the extent that the latter is even possible.

I’m glad that the folks at the Times and the Post are “true believers” in objective reporting.

Now if they’d just become true practitioners thereof. . . . But the shabby misrepresentations we’ve seen suggest that they’re not even up to the “accuracy, fairness and honesty” part. Which is why, of course, they’re losing readers to people like Roggio.

UPDATE: Michael Yon is calling for volunteers to do something about this problem:

One year ago, the gap between the ground reports from Iraq from military friends prompted my travel to Iraq to see for myself just what was happening. The dispatches posted to these pages over the ensuing months were an attempt to bridge that gap. Now that I’m back in the United States for a time, trying wring every bit of information of the war out of the news, only to come up dry most days, it’s become clear that in just under a year, the media gap has morphed into a chasm. Before this thing becomes a black hole, it’s time for a few good men and women to put their military experience and expertise to use in an operation that can create an alternative channel that will allow frontline information to break through and be heard.

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Pentagon isn’t helping, something I’ve noted here before. Here’s an email from a Colonel recently back from Iraq — he’d probably rather I not use his name:

The Department of Defense and the services are not keeping abreast of changing times and are therefore failing the strategic communications mission. By failing to engage “blogs” they are not reaching an outlet that itself has millions of “hits” a year. As you are well aware Blogs have had a tremendous impact on the media mainly due to the unfettered ability to reach out and touch just about everyone. Blogs are quickly gaining more and more credibility and will soon be the source of information, and analysis for millions of Americans and others around the world.

The MSM does not support the war and their reporting is slanted and one sided. Basically 3 TV stations and several newspapers decide what the American people should listen to and read. Why does the White House and DoD continually go back to the same outlets that twist stories to meet their ideological goals.

I think DoD and the services should include bloggers as part of their distribution lists and include them in the regular press conferences and press releases. If this requires issuing credentials then do it. The Bush administration has said that the support of the American people is a strategic center of gravity in winning the war. and I believe the best method today is the use of blogs to meet that end. DoD need to use the best means possible to reach the American people and blogs are it.

I advocated this idea while serving in Iraq, but the people who were in charge of the Strategic Communications did not understand the impact that bloggers have. Or they immediately said we cannot do that, but could not explain why. I agree that the Army does not understand the impact of blogs and they are “blowing it with bloggers,” and they need to analyze the issue further and think forwardly.

It’s a big mistake, and I hope the Pentagon will rethink it.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt, on a different subject, makes a point that’s relevant here: “We are now in the second of five stages of old media death. First there was denial, and now there is anger.”

STEPHEN F. HAYES reports on a Saddam-terror connection that hasn’t gotten much attention up to now:

Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis.

I hope we’re killing a lot of them now.

UPDATE: Jason van Steenwyk isn’t fully persuaded.

AT LEAST IT’S NOT THE NSA:

The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone — for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.

Criminals can use such records to expose a government informant who regularly calls a law enforcement official.

Suspicious spouses can see if their husband or wife is calling a certain someone a bit too often.

And employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist — or a competing company.

Some online services might be skirting the law to obtain these phone lists, according to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use.

Meanwhile, Generation Why? notes an ironic twist.