May 2004 Archives

Literally. We're on the island of Kauai right now. Let me just say that it is a bit breezy out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Although, the views are great. Photo uploading should commence shortly. It is how I justified buying a days worth of wireless access after all.

Update: Holy crap upload is slow as molasses in winter in Antarctica.

The only problem with Nader as VP is that if he is as principled as he says he is, he would turn it down. If he really believes that there isn't a nickel of difference between Bush and Kerry why would he accept a VP position? How would that help destroy the power monopoly of the two major parties which he love to rail against? If he accepted a VP nod, would it destroy his "street cred" and thus render him powerless to affect change from the inside?

I'm still left wondering how far to the left do you have to be to see Kerry and Bush and the same political entity? It doesn't make any sense to me. It didn't make any sense when he leveled the same accusation at Gore. If Gore had been elected would we have John Ashcroft as AG? No. Would we have Albert Gonzales in the White House writing memos about how silly and quaint the Geneva Conventions are? No. Do we have Rice, Rummy, Wolfowitz, Perle or Feith screwing things up with the neocon vision thing? No.

Whatever. Nader, do what you want. Run. Drop out. Dance around naked. It's not my place to ask him not to run, but I'm casting my vote to ensure Bush is fired.

U.S. Plans to Name A New Commander

President Bush plans to appoint a new, higher-ranking military commander for Iraq, capping an overhaul of the command structure that is likely to replace Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez as the top general on the ground there, Pentagon and other administration officials said yesterday.

Sanchez has been besieged lately by questions about his oversight of detainee operations in Iraq, especially his role in the scandal over the abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. But administration officials said the move to install a new four-star commander has been under consideration for months, well before the mistreatment of detainees became major news.

Talk about steady leadership in times of change! This is a classic BushCo move. Try something, screw it up big time, resist change due to the fact that you claim nothing is wrong, then cave to pressure with a change and say that was the plan all along. Riiiiight. I'll buy that for a dollar.

Is it that hard to say you're wrong? Even once?

Get your stickers today!

Okay, this is interesting. Everyone wondered what Blair was doing by staying so close to Bush. The British press was calling him a poodle for it. Now some details, which may or may not be related, are trickling out.

The Blair government knew in advance that the Sun newspaper was to launch a week-long campaign on the "immigration crisis" last summer, and immediately moved to neutralise the issue in collaboration with the tabloid, it was claimed yesterday.

Murdoch owns the Sun in the UK, and Fox News here in there States. Murdoch is a shill for the Bush administration. Blair stays close to Bush to gain some media protection from Murdoch. It doesn't make much sense though. There are lots of papers in the UK. Why would protection from the Sun matter? That must not be it...

Please welcome H.R. 163 and S. 89. No deferments and chicks get to play too. Although the rumor of it going to 30 turned out not to be true, at least in this draft of the bill. 18-26 are the ones that are eligible. Link via Warren.

5/24/2004 edited URLs so they actually worked.

Let me tell you, there is nothing like an enthusiastic coffee machine.

This is from a coffee machine in the Datatel break room, in Fairfax Virginia, where I was taking the uPortal Advanced class.

I live in California's Second Congressional District and my Representative is Wally Herger. He's registered as a Republican, although he votes with George Bush, so I don't really know what his political leanings really are. Being somewhat politically active I get a lot of requests to send in "Action Alerts" to congress from various organizations. I tend to choose the fax option because even though it costs a bit more for the organization doing the alert, it gets more attention than an e-mail.

So, since Wally is getting a number of faxes from me, his staff dutifully sends me a nice canned response. Usually they are that topic's GOP Talking Points with my name put at the top and his signature at the bottom. I've become so frustrated with these letters that I've started an online project to "reply" to them.

Will Wally notice? Probably not. But Google will. I now bring you Wally Watch.

I'm back in cozy little Chico at last. Jet lag, a mountain of e-mail, a mountain range of unread bloglines items and the stupidest letter yet (believe me, that's really saying something) from Wally Herger are all sitting in front of me, so I'll be quick.

Things I would like hotels to be rated on:

• Water pressure
• Free/open wi-fi
• Beers on tap at the bar
• Thread-count of the sheets
• Do they get Comedy Central and ESPN

The extras of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are awesome, but I would expect no less from Criterion.

I learned a lot of good stuff at the training session. I have two days to brain dump before we're off to Hawaii. Yay!

I am alive, mostly. I'm in the D.C. area for uPortal training. My net access is limited to time when I should be paying attention and small 15 minute breaks. I also refuse to pay $10/day for wireless access at the hotel which I can only use in the lobby.

Also, next week I will be in Hawaii.

The Washington Post has a couple of very detailed looks at Bush and his war chest. Where does it come from? What do people get for giving or gathering large sums of money?

Since 1998, Bush has raised a record $296.3 million in campaign funds, giving him an overwhelming advantage in running against Vice President Al Gore and now Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). At least a third of the total -- many sources believe more than half -- was raised by 631 people. (emphasis mine)

They also have a nice interactive flash piece which illustrates the spheres of influence. You can also get a PDF version, although it doesn't have all the person data on each member that the flash piece does.

Bush's Approval Ratings Soar Despite Troubles At Home

The man has a 48% approval rating. They mention that in the first paragraph. It's practically half what he had right after 9/11. Is this insanity, incompetence, or just a hack at work?

I'll grant you that it is a college paper and that the quality may be a bit lower than what you typically expect from a news source. But really, come on..."soaring."

Geek are funny and predictable. For those that use weblogging software, you probably have heard about Movable Type (MT) , or at the very least say "Powered by Movable Type" at the bottom of a site you frequently read, like this one. MT is everywhere. It was mostly free for personal use. You could donate and get a key which gave you special super powers. Actually it didn't give you super powers, but it did let you ping movabletype.org when you made a new post and you could see your weblog in lights on the mt.org site.

Anway...

If you don't read Cursor you should. They could use a few good people to give them a few good dollars.

I was watching the Daily Show and saw that Kristol was on, having a nice chat with Jon. I figured I would drop by The Weekly Standard and see what it was like, mainly because I've never read their stuff.

Now I know why. From Fred Barnes we have Myths of Iraq.

WE'VE ALL HEARD those classic myths of the Iraq debate that just won't go away. First, President Bush is said to have called Iraq under Saddam Hussein an "imminent" threat and, second, the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda has never been substantiated. Both are laughably false.

Josh Marshall had a nice contest on the whole did they say imminent brouhaha. I think we can laughably agree that they did consider Iraq an "imminent" threat.

The other point, bogus al Qaeda connections, is so funny that he doesn't even offer a single link or tidbit of information to show us how Saddam and bin Laden were really gay lovers. Maybe he was too busy laughing.

But what really got me was his closing bit.

The best that can happen is for America and whoever winds up running the Iraqi government to muddle through to democracy. I'm betting this is exactly what will happen.

Wow. Brilliant. Bravo. Three cheers for muddling! At least he didn't advocate nuking the place.

Got this beauty in a "targeted e-mail."

Skinny Puppy and Tim McGraw together at last!

Now I'm not sure how the artists get picked for these e-mails. I'm sure it's some sort of automated system based on my ticket purchases in the past combined with a payola system. So, since I bought Pixies tickets I obviously want to go see Skinny Puppy because I hate any music made after 1991 and I live in the past. On the other hand, Tim McGraw has a promotional budget and he had to pay to get into my e-mail. Poor Tim...if only he knew I lived in the past and hated all music made after 1991.

The Kings finally managed another win against the Timberwolves. Bibby just turned 26.

After the game, fans serenaded Bibby with an impromptu rendition of "Happy Birthday."

You know you are a copyright dork when you think to yourself that it's a good thing for the Kings that Arco Area has all the appropriate licenses, otherwise they would get nailed for an unauthorized public performance of a copyrighted work. Then you are still amazed that it took two people to write "Happy Birthday."

Geez I'm a dork...

When hate-spewing "pundits" ask where is the outrage from the Muslim world over the beheading, show them this.

A good hearted conservative tried to convince me today that only $0.05 of every dollar donated to the Red Cross went towards helping people and that their financial records were not public. This is not the case. In fact, the exact opposite is the reality of the situation. "Management and General" account for 5% of the 2003 Operating Expenditures, as can be seen in their 2003 Report to the American People (PDF). But wait...there's more!

Of course, his point was that the Red Cross isn't 100% good. There is some non-zero amount of "waste" in the organization. That cannot be denied, nor is it a realistic standard to hold any organization that deals with over $3 billion a year. Just look at how hard it is for the Pentagon to keep track of all their cash. They're still trying to account for over $2.3 trillion. I'm not trying to make excuses, just pointing out reality. Trying to keep waste as close to zero as possible is the goal, all the while maximizing the number of people helped. That and public financial records should be just what the doctor ordered.

For other tasty tidbits you might want to browse their Federal Charter to see how they are tied to the Department of Defense.

Being a liberal, I'm often accused of wanting to regulate everything and making sure there are more than enough stupid laws. I happen to think that conservatives come up with enough stupid laws on their own, but that's not really where I'm going with this. If we're going to have stupid laws, I at least want to get my $0.02 in.

So, without further delay here is my list of stupid laws I would like to see used to drag this great country down:

• All Billy Joel songs are banned from Supermarket music systems.

Actually, that's all I've got. I figured that being liberal meant I would have endless stupid laws floating around in my big empty head. Guess not.

This is from "Have I Ever Lied To You?" by Art Buchwald

The debate on Vietnam has been escalating along with the fighting, and now it's rare to go to a party and not get into a hot fight over what we should or should not be doing there.

Professor Heinrich Applebaum, the military analyst of Seventeen magazine, has just written a book titled How to Fight the Vietnam War in the Living Room. It is the only book written for both doves and hawks, and I was happy to interview him about it.

"This war will not be won in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, but rather in the salons and renovated basements of the American home," Applebaum told me.

"How does one start a discussion on the Vietnam war?"

"The best way is to say, 'I agree we shouldn't have been there in the first place, but—' It's a perfect opener if you're a hawk, and it shows you're willing to concede that the government has made mistakes."

"And if you're a dove?"

"Your opening line should be: I'm not for just pulling out and leaving South Vietnam in the lurch, but—' This should prove to your listeners that you're a man of reason, and you're not going to get emotional about the issue."

"As a hawk, what should you do next?"

"Mention Munich, the domino theory, and our commitment to the free world, not necessarily in that order."

"And if you're a dove?"

"Talk about the stupidity of the French, the naivete of John Foster Dulles, and the right for people to have their own revolutions without outside interference from the United States."

"How do you follow it up?"

"You have to quote sources. If you're a hawk, you quote Joe Alsop, Bob Hope, Cardinal Spellman, Barry Goldwater, and Time magazine. If you're a dove, you refer to Walter Lipp-mann's last column, speeches by Senator Fulbright and Robert F. Kennedy, and testimony by General Gavin, Robert Lowell, and Joan Baez. Even if they didn't say something, you can always claim they did. No one in the living room is going to be able to check up on you."

"Don't you quote President Johnson, Secretary Dean Rusk, or Robert McNamara?"

"It's hardly worth it. Neither the hawks nor the doves believe anything the people in our government tell them."

"Outsiders always know more," I agreed.

"Now if you see the argument is running down, you can always refer to a book you read on Vietnam. People are very impressed with anyone in the crowd who has read a book, and it shows you've gone deeper into the subject than anyone else in the room."

"Any special book?"

"The best one is a title that no one has ever heard of, particularly if it's been written by someone with a foreign name. It will make the other side very mad, and he'll have to come up with a book of his own."

"It gets harder as you go along," I said.

"The important thing is to speak with authority and pretend to know what you're talking about."

"But suppose you lose the argument?"

"You can always punch the guy in the nose."

One of the sites that I'm very lucky to be a contributor on, Forwarding Address:OS X, is re-launched with a savagely fresh look. Please do check it out. Oh, the RSS link isn't on the front page right now, I'm sure that will change. Of course, it does have an auto-discovery link, so it isn't much of a problem with almost every XML syndication reader out there.

Orcinus

1. The well-being of American democracy ultimately depends on a well-informed electorate. As such, the role of the media in keeping the public properly informed is not merely vital, it is sacred.

2. Over the past 20 years, American media have been in a state of serious decline insofar is it lives up to the responsibilities of this role:
-- Conglomeration and the increasing grip of monolithic corporatism has reduced the diversity of voices and viewpoints that are available to the public at all levels, from small local papers to major networks.

-- The rising dominance of television journalism has replaced serious journalism geared toward the public interest and policy with infotainment journalism that regards the value of stories almost solely for their ability to garner viewers through titillation, scandal-mongering and gore, while the perverse and demeaning cult of celebrity is elevated to the highest echelons.

-- The demise of the Fairness Doctrine has ensured that the public airwaves, controlled by a handful of conservatives given free rein to institute a hierarchy or self-interested propaganda, are now entirely the domain of right-wing ideologues who view defamation as entertainment and factuality and fairness as ratings death.

-- As a result of all these changes, reportage that remained vital to the public interest even though it may not have garnered strong bottom-line results -- especially investigative journalism, policy analysis, and international news -- became relegated to afterthought status.

3. The nature of these declines produced a string of travesties in the past decade and more:
-- The first major terrorist attack on American soil -- the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 169 people -- was treated as the idiosyncratic act of a small handful of mentally unstable actors, rather than as the arrival of the most serious threat to confront America since World War II: asymmetrical terrorist attacks that cannot be linked to foreign states and which cannot be dealt with through military action.

-- The continuing appearance of similar attempts to perpetrate equally horrific domestic terrorist attacks, mostly by right-wing extremists, in the five years ensuing Oklahoma City was utterly ignored by media outlets, largely because of the success of law enforcement in stopping such attacks in their tracks through an effective combination of law enforcement and intelligence.

-- The grotesque pursuit of pseudo-scandals regarding President Clinton's private life -- from Whitewater to "Travelgate" to Monica Lewinsky -- became the centerpiece of national coverage of his presidency, eclipsing any rational discussion of his administration's policy initiatives as well as those of the post-1994 Republican Congress. This pursuit finally culminated in charade of Clinton's impeachment for allegedly perjuring himself in testimony over a civil suit that should never have been allowed in the first place, while in the meantime the clearly Machiavellian and unethical behavior of his pursuers went almost utterly unreported.

-- The media fetish for Clinton's private life buried the seriousness of the growing assymetrical terrorist threat, embodied in the treatment of Clinton's attacks on Al Qaeda terrorist camps in 1998 as mere "wagging the dog" attempts to divert public attention from the Lewinsky scandal. At a time when Clinton was attempting to raise public awareness of the terrorist threat -- both domestically and abroad -- his pleas fell on the media's deaf ears because they had "other priorities."

-- The 2000 presidential campaign between Al Gore and George W. Bush became focused on trivial personality traits -- particularly Gore's supposed "embellishments" (such as the false "invented the Internet" meme) and Bush's supposed "straight shooter" qualities -- all of which were pure concoctions of partisan spin that favored the corporatist agenda of media ownership. The resulting extraordinary bias culminated in the Florida vote debacle in which Republicans were allowed to present pure falsehoods (such as the notion that machine counts were "more accurate" than hand counts) as fact, while Gore's legitimate efforts to challenge the counts under the established framework were depicted as illegitimate; and in the end, an extraordinarily corrupt and partisan Supreme Court ruling that overwhelmed Gore's popular-vote victory and placed Bush in the White House was treated as simply politics as usual, instead of the gross breach of democratic values that it was. It also placed in the White House a man manifestly incapable of comprehending the nature and gravity of the looming terrorist threat.

4. This degradation of the media, and its concomitant failure to keep Americans adequately informed, culminated in the attacks on American soil by Al Qaeda terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, in which more than 3,000 people were killed in New York City and Washington, D.C. The media, to no one's great surprise, have never even begun to confront their own culpability in this disaster; and similarly they have failed to point out the fairly obvious culpability of the asleep-at-the-wheel president on whose watch it occurred. (Meanwhile, of course, Bill Clinton's role in the attacks has been aired ad nauseam.)

5. When George W. Bush sidetracked the resulting "war on terror" into an invasion of Iraq -- a nation that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks -- by waving evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the public's face and suggesting that any dissent was akin to treason, the media utterly failed in its responsibility to examine the claims seriously and to treat them skeptically. Instead, it became a virtual propaganda arm for the White House, and savagely turned on any person (see, e.g., Scott Ritter, who was smeared as a pedophile) who dared play the role of skeptic. Protesters were summarily dismissed as loony "Bush haters."

6. Coverage of the 2004 election has already begun to resemble the travesty of 2000, focusing on trivial (and mostly concocted) personality traits: Howard Dean is grotesquely portrayed as a maniacal and out-of-control Howard Bealesque loose cannon; John Edwards as a callow pretty boy; Wesley Clark as an egotistical martinet; and Dennis Kucinich as a whiny, limp-wristed socialist. Once he became the de facto nominee, the "French-like" John Kerry was given both barrels of this treatment, as his status as a war hero came under fire without any grounds whatsoever, while other reports focused on his being served peanut-butter sandwiches by a personal assistant. Meanwhile, patrician fraternity brother George W. Bush is depicted as a man of the people, clearing brush on his Texas ranch. Matters of substantive policy that actually affect voters' lives -- the administration's floundering in Iraq; an economic policy that deprived over 2 million Americans of employment and destroyed the nation's job-creation capacity; an environmental policy that ensured more polluted air and water and diminished wildlife, as well as the more rapid approach of global warming; an energy policy that ensured $2-a-gallon-and-worse gasoline and increasing dependence on oil; an agricultural policy that dooms forever the small family farm -- have not even crossed the media's radar.

7. Americans have had enough. Like Howard Beale, they're mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. Unlike Beale, however, their revolt against the media Powers That Be will be neither manic nor futile. It will be organized, rational, factually sound, unintimidated and, in the end, constructive rather than destructive. It will be founded on certain basic principles:
-- The bastardization of modern mass media into a propaganda outlet for narrow conservative corporate interests, in violation of its historic (and constitutional) role as guardian of the public weal, will be opposed at every turn. The driving forces behind this corruption are the conglomeration and deregulation of the media, and the concomitant suppression of dissenting voices; the vanity and naked self-interest of the press corps, embodied in their open embrace of spin as fact; the willingness of the public to embrace "lowest common denominator" reporting that, instead of making them informed participants in democracy, treats them to the illusion of news as entertainment.

-- Its chief bylaw will be an insistence on traditional journalistic values: factual correctness, fairness and balance, a healthy skepticism of the reigning "official story," conventional wisdom, and the claims of critics and defenders alike. It will seek a return to the nation's newsrooms of the kind of investigative and consumer-oriented journalism that has been the first victim of the bottom-line orientation of corporate media ownership, as well as the kind of newsroom oversight in the form of truly independent ombudsmen that once ensured that someone was watching the watchdogs on behalf of the public.

-- It will embrace the principles of American democracy, particularly openness of debate and the open dissemination of information. It will never embrace or even suggest the suppression of conservative views; instead, it will be predicated on confronting bad speech with more speech. All we will demand is the equal consideration and dissemination of other viewpoints as well.

-- The degradation of the national discourse into trivialities and prurient speculation will be the focus of the revolt. When reporters insist on covering politics as a horse race, replacing serious analysis of policy and its effects on the real life of citizens with gossip columns and talking points, and especially when they engage in fraudulent journalism that twists and conceals the truth, they will be exposed for the untrustworthy miscreants they are. When corporate owners adopt de facto policies -- from gutting serious journalism in newsrooms, to a bias in hiring and promotion, to the outright suppression of dissent -- which slant the reporting that fills our newspaper columns and the public airwaves, they will be brought to bay by public pressure to respect the public's right to (and need for) informative, factual and balanced journalism. When the public is carelessly and selfishly gulled by entertainment propaganda posing as journalism, we will combat their languor by working hard to disseminate facts and logic through the many means now available to us in the computer age.

8. This revolt will be organized strategically around two realities: 1) Previous tactics in the efforts to reform the nation's media have largely failed or faltered (see, e.g., the "public journalism" movement), though their occasional successes and certain principles are well worth noting and preserving. 2) Though this is a revolution against an evolved status quo, the spirit it represents beckons to a return to civic-minded journalism that enshrines the diversity of voices in American media; it is, in fact, more traditionalist in orientation than radical. What is radical -- and unacceptable -- is the current state of journalism as a wholly owned subsidiary and propaganda arm of narrow corporate interests.
-- It will generally eschew boycotts of the media themselves. Such an attempt is not only unlikely to have any discernible effect (media companies are notorious for targeting "key demographics" anyway), it's self-defeating, since it's impossible to be informed enough to act as a media watchdog without being a consumer of their goods as well.

-- It will nonetheless apply pressure against media companies -- economic pressure through boycotts, and rhetorical pressure through letter-writing and publicity campaigns -- through two key venues: advertisers and the media conglomerates' non-media enterprises.

-- The businesses whose advertising dollars underwrite so much of this misbehavior can be especially sensitive to having their names associated with volatile issues that inflame public anger. Even mass letter-writing campaigns to these companies can have the desired effect; and if necessary, an outright boycott may be wielded.

-- Likewise, business boycotts of the larger media conglomerates under whose auspices the corruption of the press has occurred may be useful or even necessary, particularly if the misbehavior is egregious enough or actually occurs at the larger corporate level. Disney, for example, fully deserves a boycott for its outrageous corporate decision to prevent its Miramax subsidiary from distributing Roger Moore's anti-Bush film, Fahrenheit 911.

-- These campaigns will be focused especially on two key problems: the decline of journalistic standards for both factual straightness and depth of coverage, and the perversion of the national debate by focusing on trivialities and "character" issues in the place of serious policy matters.

-- The revolution also will demand certain legislative and structural changes that will break up the monoculturalization of the media and return it to its former diversity and openness. Foremost among these is the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. The demise (during the Reagan administration) of this regulatory protection against the partisan abuse of the public airwaves proved to be the cornerstone of the rise of the modern conservative domination of radio, particularly in the realm of the propagandist talk shows which too many Americans use as a substitute for serious information sources. The fears of the original critics of ending the doctrine -- that station owners would see the change as carte blanche for handing over the airwaves to a monochromatic ideology (in this case, conservatism) that only recently has begun to show cracks in the facade -- have manifested themselves all too clearly.

-- Along the same lines, but even more importantly, is the need to return many of the rules limiting the breadth of media ownership that were eliminated during the "deregulation" of the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, and whose few remnants now remain under attack by the Bush-appointed FCC chairman. The vertical and horizontal integration of the nation's mass media is having the same destructive effect as the similar integration of the nation's food industry, ranging all the way from small-town papers devoured and gutted by chains to cable-TV and network news becoming increasingly dominated by a travesty of the journalistic ethos twisted into a perverse culture of celebrity whose broad effect is to numb and paralyze the populace. Our means of informing the public have been winnowed down to a handful of large corporations who continue to demonstrate an utter disregard for anything beyond their own narrow interests. And those interests in recent years have come to clearly include keeping the public in relative ignorance by keeping them focused on trivialities and phony non-issues.

-- In the long run, this will require structural changes -- both in FCC and other regulatory policy, as well as in the tax and investment infrastructures -- that both require and encourage the breakup of media conglomerates. At the same time, it will be important to encourage (also through tax and investment infrastructures, as well as various small-business initiatives) the revitalization of small local ownership of the nation's media, along with the diversification of national-media outlets, ranging from the creation of viable newswire services beyond the current Asssociated Press monopoly to the divestment of national news networks from their dominance of cable TV.

-- This must be a nonpartisan revolution, though of course the immediate beneficiaries will be progressives, liberals and centrists, since all have faced a relentless assault from the conservative movement over the past decade regarding their voice within the mainstream media. (The entire purpose of the "liberal media" myth was to cast any idea or policy that fell outside the conservative party line as the product of a corrupt "liberalism.") Nonetheless, there are also conservatives of good will who recognize that the current cabal controlling both the government and media represent nothing particularly to do with genuine conservative values and almost entirely to do with the Manichean acquisition and manipulation of power. All Americans of every political stripe stand to benefit from these reforms, especially since their abuse in this decade can become a two-edged sword in another generation. No one, liberal or conservative alike, benefits from a constricted media that is only good for transmitting propaganda and lacks the diversity that is essential to informing a democracy.

9. The Internet -- and in particular, blogs -- will be the cornerstone of the strategy this media revolution will follow, though of course all means are important participants. Indeed, the reforms are intended to reach every facet of American mass media: newspapers large and small, television, film, radio, books, and of course the Internet.

For that matter, blogs themselves are odd creatures in that, except for the handful who actually engage in original reporting themselves, they are almost entirely dependent on other media forms, particularly print and Internet journalism. But part of what makes them unique is that they synthesize and contain information from all these other sources.

Blogs are, above all, uniquely democratic in nature. Anyone can blog. Supposedly serious "name" journalists ultimately have no more real value in the blogosphere than pseudonymous gym teachers who reveal a knack for being in touch with the larger populace. The value of what you write about, and how well you do it, is all that finally counts.

Blogs are also uniquely self-correcting in a way that eludes most other media; if false information is disseminated, it doesn't take long before it's eviscerated by other bloggers. This function, indeed, forms the backbone of its larger role as a media watchdog; just as blogs will "out" bad blogging, they also have been shown to expose false reporting, as well as malicious behavior on the part of both politicians and the press that might otherwise be buried in the "mainstream."

Because the blogosphere is still more or less in its infancy, it remains somewhat indistinct in shape, though a larger architecture is already beginning to emerge. There are inherent flaws, not the least of which is that a consistent blogger ethos seems not to have emerged fully but has remained formative; at some point, a sense of journalistic ethics ought to take root in the name of establishing credibility.

Nonetheless, blogs can and should play the role of central clearing-house for information in the Media Revolt. As the general public realizes that blogs can provide them with vital information they're not getting anywhere else, the audience will build. This includes the whole gamut of information: the factual news about the world, as well as reports on who's misbehaving or committing political atrocities or simply being incompetent; analysis of this information that would be suppressed in mainstream reports; information about planned actions to protest misbehavior; and action and funds needed to enact the needed legislative and structural reforms.

Blogs, in other words, can and should play the role abdicated by the mainstream media both in monitoring their own behavior and ethics, and in providing enough diversity that a wealth of viewpoints are given fair treatment, as in any healthy democratic society, and the public properly served.

Blogs will not and cannot do the job alone, of course. The whole purpose of the revolt is to foster an environment in which mainstream journalists, from the lowly ink-stained wretch to the well-coiffed network anchor, are both allowed and positively encouraged to provide truthful and meaningful journalism that provides vital information to the public and does it responsibly and thoroughly. So that will mean recognizing and positively celebrating when superior journalism does its job well; such reporters and truth-tellers should be lauded, promoted, and in the end well remunerated for their work. It will mean channeling the marketplace to reward organizations that do their job well, too.

Finally, the Media Revolt will tap the energy of the citizenry through traditional means as well: Letter-writing campaigns, voting with our pocketbooks, organizing politics and funds on the ground -- without which, in fact, anything that occurs on the Web may prove meaningless. The idea is to turn from simply critiquing the media to taking concrete action.

10. There should be no naivete about the nature of what we are up against. This is a revolt against a national discourse that has degraded into a puerile swamp of innuendo, smear, and dishonest reportage. Anyone participating must be prepared to have the worst of this kind of tactic used ruthlessly against them. And yet because of that, the revolt must at every turn repudiate such tactics and refuse ever to engage them: there must be no groundless insinuation or nakedly false "facts." When they natter about "character" or "likeability," we should talk plainly about policy and what happens in the real world. Smears (that is, fact-free attacks on a public figure's personal character) should not be answered with counter-smears. It's fair (if a concession to diversionary tactics) to fight back with facts, but never fair to resort to twisting or omitting: that's what they do. Cutting corners just to score political points is a Pyrrhic victory. If this is a revolt about integrity, then it will fail if it does not emody integrity itself.

Questions about our opponents' characters, of course, will remain an issue as long as they insist on framing the debate that way, and as long as they keep providing factual reasons to remain dubious. But defeating them should never be predicated on attacking their characters; it should be founded on their disastrous and incompetent stewardship of both the national media and the government itself.

Undertaking this task means hard work. But it has become clear to us as citizens, in an age when fear and terror rule our body politic, that what is at stake here is the soul of democracy itself. To save it, no labor should seem too great.

Orcinus

After two weeks in FedEx limbo, the package I sent to our doppelgangers in Australia finally arrived. I hope the mini iPods are a big hit down under.

Also, tonight the Sacramento Kings pulled it together and won a tough game on the road in Minnesota against the Timberwolves. I like their chances to go all the way. I wonder what HST is putting on the Kings this year?

So I just saw the intro to Tough Crowd. What can I say, it's on after the Daily Show, sometimes I forget to turn the TV off soon enough. The first few seconds he had me. A red, white and blue banner with "My Bad" in "Mission Accomplished" style and he walked out in a fake flight suit, aviator glasses and all. He started mussing about how Bush was in a no-win situation. I had a mental pause, had Colin reverted from his Dennis Miller imitation? Nope.

He then went on to muse about how we were a super power and Bush should use the same finger he used to wipe coke off his nose in the 70's to nuke prominent middle easter cities, oh and he threw in Pyong Yang for good measure. Nuke the middle east! That's a great idea Colin. I'm sure that would make Israel safe and stop terrorism against the United States. I'm sure it would only kill the terrorists anyway.

Idiot.

A restaurant chain is slapped by the DoJ for discrimination against blacks. Big deal? It was Cracker Barrel. It may be wrong to laugh at that, but come on! Cracker Barrel?

How will jwz welcome this robot master?

'Robosaurus', a 40-foot-tall, 30-ton mechanical robot, breathes fire after eating a car during a demonstration at Airfest 2004 in this recent photo taken at the March Air Reserve Base, in Riverside, Calif. The two day air show which took place April 24-25, 2004 features both military and civilian aerial and ground demonstrations. (U.S. Air Force /Tech. Sgt Joe Zuccaro, HO)

The Navy needs to build a new runway. They found a spot they like. What's the problem? Farmers and birds.

The nemesis of the farmers and the bird-loving environmentalists is as formidable as they come: the U.S. Navy. The Navy is making an appeal to patriotism and arguing that it is justified in buying -- or, if need be, seizing -- more than 30,000 acres of farmland near the refuge to build a landing strip to polish the skills of pilots for its snazziest new crop of planes, the supersonic F/A-18E/F Super Hornets. The landing strip would be the first major new Navy facility since the 1960s and would break ground at a time when bases across the country are closing.

Little do the farmers know in that very instant they were transformed from domestic heroes that provide sustenance to patriotic Americans into "environmental whackos" and will now be derided as such on the Rush Limbaugh show. I'm sure Bill O'Reilly will tag them as "socialists," Ann Coulter will write them off as communists, and Karen Huges will say they are in bed with al Qaeda. Life moves pretty fast. Try and keep up.

So I sat down today and took a crack at making an iMix. I really tried to pick stuff I thought would be in the store. My net connection is horribly slow today, so I wasn't in the mood to check each track before I put it on the mix. Out of the 19 tracks you see below, a measly 6 showed up in my Beats n' Bop iMix. Oh well. Enjoy the full list: