Washington Post printed an article by Youssef M. Ibrahim Will the Mideast Bloom?
Listen to the conversations in the cafes on the edge of the creek that runs through this Persian Gulf city, and it is hard to believe that the George W. Bush being praised by Arab diners is the same George W. Bush who has been widely excoriated in these parts ever since he took office.
Yet the balmy breeze blowing along the creek carries murmurs of approval for the devoutly Christian U.S. president, whose persistent calls for democracy in the Middle East are looking less like preaching and more like timely encouragement.
Nowadays, intellectuals, businessmen and working-class people alike can be caught lauding Bush's hard-edged posture on democracy and cheering his handling of Arab rulers who are U.S. allies. Many also admire Bush's unvarnished threats against Syria should it fail to pull its soldiers and spies out of Lebanon before the elections there next month -- a warning the United Nations reinforced last week with immediate effects. For Bush, it is not quite a lovefest but a celebration nonetheless.....
Regardless of Bush's intentions -- which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion -- the U.S. president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigor to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills. It's enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush's attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right.....
For now, all the Middle East has are demonstrators and brave voters who, ballot by imperfect ballot, e-mail by e-mail are burying a culture of fear. And for the moment, that may be enough.
Gene @HarrysPlace provided a cartoon that appeared March 3 in a Jordanian newspaper, al-Ghad, that captured the sense that the age of autocracy may be drawing to a close. Political cartoonist Emad Hajjaj drew four statues on pedestals. The one furthest to the right, Saddam Hussein, is cracking at the knees and toppling into an almost identical statue of Syrian leader Bashir Assad, which is teetering into a statue of Mubarak, who is falling into a statue whose face can't be seen.
Arthur Dent commented That cartoon is very sharp. If it had just shown Bashar toppling after Saddam followed by "Etc" the point would have been much less clear - but including Mubarek before "Etc" in a Jordanian newspaper is more than hint that the local regime is also on the way out.
Betsy Newmark said No one knows what will happen here, but my thought is that once people have awakened to the question of why they can't have democracy and others in the region can, they will not soon forget that question.
Pejman Yousefzadeh said Personally, I would have titled the article "The Sudden Love and Adoration of the Arab Street," but that's just me.
Freedom is a powerful seed. It needs to be carefully tended, but when it blooms it will be beautiful.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Will the Mideast Bloom?
Blogging Diversity
Newsweek raised the question Blogging Beyond the Men's Club
Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?
Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of NEWSWEEK] said "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion," Jenkins wrote. "My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere ... will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."
After the comment was posted, a couple of the women at the conference—bloggers MacKinnon and Halley Suitt—looked around and saw that there weren't many other women in attendance.
So why, when millions of blogs are written by all sorts of people, does the top rung look so homogeneous? It appears that some clubbiness is involved. Suitt puts it more bluntly: "It's white people linking to other white people!" (A link from a popular blog is this medium's equivalent to a Super Bowl ad.) Suitt attributes her own high status in the blogging world to her conscious decision to "promote myself among those on the A list."
La Shawn said While I have noticed that the top bloggers tend to link to each other, and most of them happen to be white males, I know for a fact the "old boys' club" of bloggers isn't impenetrable. I've managed to break through several times, but that usually comes with e-mailing links, which is something I used to avoid. The drawback of such an admission is that if/when I'm linked by a high-profile blogger, the assumption is that I've e-mailed them. Not the case every time.
Halley Suitt said Okay, can I mention a blog that's got diversity coming out it's ears!? A blog that's got a female voice AND a male voice. A blog that's got an Asian voice, a Canadian voice, an American voice, all wrapped up into one. A blog about love and technology and a wedding and music and Toronto and Boston and The Phillipines.
I don't think the top bloggers have much time to read a lot blogs, and I suspect mine isn't on their agenda most days. Consequently, I made the same decision as Halley Suitt. I decided that I wanted to promote myself among those on the A-list. I have high aspirations for my career as a writer and blogger, and getting the attention of high-profile bloggers is a necessary step.
Roger Ailes said Shouldn't this article be about the perpetuation of white male dominance at Harvard academic conferences, rather than while male dominance of the blogosphere? .... Here's a radical suggestion for MacKinnon if she wants more diversity at her next blogfest: Invite more women and people of color. Until then, stop pretending that your problem and Harvard's is someone else's.
Glenn Reynolds writes LaShawn Barber has thoughts on the power of email. Don't be a pest (there's one guy who emails me every time he updates his blog, which as a consequence I've never visited) but don't be too shy, either. I try to get around, but there are a lot of blogs. I'm more likely to discover your blog if you send me a link to a post that I'll be interested in.
LaShawn Barber (a black female) writes At the risk of sounding like a liberal, I do wish more blacks and women were invited to these blogger conferences and called for TV spots and radio interviews. I won’t complain too much, though. I’ll just continue blogging about what interests me and hope you find something on the blog that interests you. I remain hopeful that “affirmative action” will keep its ugly hands out of the pot. We will rise or fall on pure blogging. And some high-profile linkage.
Sissy Willis writes What does a woman want? Like a man, it depends upon the individual. With a nod to Helen Reddy, I am blogger, hear me roar In numbers too big to ignore.
CQ wrote Anyone who wants to be successful at blogging can achieve it, as long as they're willing to write well and often and market themselves effectively. Even established authors don't automatically transfer their success to the blogosphere. Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt have because they understand the blog market
EdDriscoll said Since the early 1990s, newspapers have tried to promote diversity purely as a function of skin color and gender. But getting noticed in the Blogosphere isn't a function of diversity--it's a function of talent, perseverance, and marketing skills. And as Morrissey notes above, all of those skills are very much color--and gender--blind.
SensibleMom said It’s interesting that people are commenting on the fact that the blogosphere is made up of white males because, to me, the blogosphere is colorblind. That is, unless someone posts their picture, no one knows whether they’re white, black, asian, etc. It is only as some of these bloggers have gained fame or a presence, and, therefore, have been interviewed that we know what their race is. Until then, though, the bulk of their readers had no idea what their race was. They just found their investigative powers and writing compelling.
I don't know about others, but I read blogs from men and women, conservatives and liberals, white, black, yellow, and brown, and from many countries. And when I see something I feel should be commented on, I do so, with a link to the originating blog entry, and if they have a TrackBack I track their entry back to mine.
Rice Won't Run
Google News showed 215 news sites (at the time I am writing this; there will probably be more soon) that reported that Secrtary of State Condoleezza Rice says she will not run for the Presidency.
But they all word it differently:
- ABC News says Rice Says She Won't Run for President
- Reuters says Rice Says She Has No Ambition to Run for President
- Sydney Morning Herald says Rice says she won't run for president
- Reuters says Rice Says She Has No Ambition to Run for President
- Chicago Sun-Times says Rice says she doesn't want to run for president
- Washington Post says 'Mildly Pro-Choice' Rice Won't Rule Out Presidential Bid
- Los Angeles Time says Rice Denies '08 Presidential Aspirations
- New York Post says Condi Won't Rule Out Run For Prez
- Seattle Times says Rice won't rule out running for president in 2008 election
Bad advice
The Washington Times ran an article by Ralph Hallow entitled Bad advice to Bush blamed for Social Security struggle. In it he said Mr. Bush has refused to rule out measures that would contradict his campaign promises on Social Security, putting himself in what conservatives say is a weak negotiating position with Democrats. "The president would do well to put markers down as to what we are going to do and what we are not going to do on Social Security taxes and benefits," said Rep. Mike Pence, Indiana Republican.
It would seem to me that doing as Mike Pence suggests is the bad advice; not what the President is doing. If Bush did as many urge him, and totally ruled out any changes, he would never get anything through. That would be just as foolish as if he did as the Democrats say, and take private accounts off the table, and then they will negotiate. That is because the only other alternatives are raising taxes (which the Dems prefer), or reducing benefits (and the Dems would like to see that, because they think they could turn that into a way of dragging votes away from the Republicans and to the Democrats.
The article also says The senior Republican senator said privately that the only way to avoid a bad deal on Social Security may be "to pull the trigger on the nuclear option." This, he said, would mean changing Senate rules to force an end to Democratic filibusters and a vote on Mr. Bush's judicial nominees. The Democrats likely would retaliate by filibustering all Republican bills. Republicans then could blame Democrats for blocking Social Security reform.
I favor blocking the practice of filibustering Judicial nominations, but I don't agree that the Democrats would be foolish enough to then Filibuster all Republican bills, especially if Bill Frist is willing to force them to really filibuster (i.e. speak continuously on a matter).
DemFromCT on DailyKos says Josh Marshall reads the Washington Times so you don't have to (and bless him for that).
This just shows how the Left thinks. I read more on the Left Wing New York Times and Washington Post than I do on the Right Wing New York Post and Washington Times. I may not agree with much of what the Left Wing Press says, but if I don't know what they are saying, I can't comment on it.
Dwight Meredith says that he wrote a few days ago The GOP may decide that the smartest move is to ram through as much legislation as they can (class action, bankruptcy, tort reform, Anwar, etc) and then go nuclear to cause the Senate to shut down before Republicans face defeat on Social Security and tax cuts. and then he goes on to quote Josh Marshall's account of the Washington Times article (another Leftie that does not read the original source) about what the "senior Republican senator said privately" about the nuclear option.
Matthew Yglesias said I had to read that a couple of times until I got it. But now I see what the Senator meant. He means that he and his colleagues don't like being stuck between the president's pressure to endorse his plan, and the public's pressure not to pass his plan. The ideal way out of the impasse would be for the GOP to go nuclear on the filibuster issue, which will lead Democrats to shut down the Senate entirely, thus getting Republican Senators off the hook. To the White House and the privateer money bags they can say, "hey! we would have passed it if it hadn't been for those Democrats" and to the voters they can say, "hey! I never voted for any such thing."
Polemic Propaganda admits that It is already the de facto Democratic objective to obstruct anything, and everything that comes up in this legislative session to the best of their ability..... The extent to which obstructionism was an obstruction to Democrats in 2002 or 2004 has been greatly exaggerated, and naturally, the only ones promoting this line are those that want to see obstructionism decrease during a majority GOP government. In any event, the nuclear option would seem a little drastic and counter-productive given that it would only enhance the lame duck effect on the executive, as it pertains to the domestic agenda, and would create unnecessary turmoil for reelection candidates in ‘06.
I believe that PP is wrong about why the Dems lost in 2002 and 2004, and that excessive filibustering will cause them to lose in 2006 also, but let's not tell the Dems that.
The GOP's Lesson on Abortion
E. J. Dionne wrote a column The GOP's Lesson on Abortion in the Washington Post, and stated: Why are George W. Bush and his party so skillful in dealing with the abortion issue, and why are Democrats so clumsy? It turns out that Democrats willing to grapple seriously with these questions risk getting seriously trashed. It makes you wonder whether Democrats enjoy losing elections.
Predictably the extreme left did not like the article. Avedon Carol: says E.J. has had a Kool-Aid day
Atros unwittingly proves EJ's point: Some evil liberals (Hollywood liberals, even!) are daring to raise money to mount primary challenges against pro-life Democrats, despite the fact that these Democrats have the overwhelming support of their party. Langevin and Casey have the support of their party, and a very tiny piece of the liberal establishment could possibly challenge them.
Max seems to understand: ventilates a pet peeve of mine in re: liberal women's organizations and the Democratic Party. Those who are soft on choice are threatened with the nuclear option, while those who betray working people and minorities in 57 other ways get over if they pass all the pro-choice litmus test questions. Meanwhile the Repubs can showcase that great pro-choice exemplar of women's rights, Gov. Schnatzengrabber. although the ad hominum attack on the California Governor is just so he does not get attacked too much by the rabid left.
EJ recognizes that the Republican party is not a single-issue party, and has no litmus test: More than that, the Republican Party has been utterly realistic, indeed ruthless, in engineering the nomination of pro-choice candidates if they had the better chance of winning. The amazing thing is that some of the staunchest opponents of abortion went right along and sidetracked allies if that was what victory required.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
No Easter Bunny
As Michelle Malkin said, with the War on Christmas behind us, it's time for the War on Easter to begin.
Multiculturalism makes people think that some might be offended if they referred to the Easter Bunny, so malls are now referring to the Garden Bunny or the Mall Bunny.
Not wanting to offend people by referring to Merry Christmas, and insisting instead saying Happy Holidays, and refusing to say Christmas Tree, and instead saying Holiday Tree was bad enough, but the Easter Bunny is not even a Christian symbol. The symbol originated with the pagan festival of Eastre. The goddess, Eastre, was worshipped by the Anglo-Saxons through her earthly symbol, the rabbit.
The Easter Egg also predates the Christian holiday of Easter. The exchange of eggs in the springtime is a custom that was centuries old when Easter was first celebrated by Christians. From the earliest times, the egg was a symbol of rebirth in most cultures. Eggs were often wrapped in gold leaf or, if you were a peasant, colored brightly by boiling them with the leaves or petals of certain flowers.
J Rob said At the risk of being the old "party pooper", I have long wished to see the Easter Bunny divorced from the Christian observance of Easter.
I fully understand what he is saying. I never was too upset at Easter Bunnies and Easter Egg Hunts, just as I never was upset at Christmas Trees (whose origin is Pagan. The Norse pagans and Celtic Druids revered evergreens as manifestations of deity because they did not "die" from year to year but stayed green and alive when other plants appeared dead and bare. The trees represented everlasting life and hope for the return of spring. The druids decorated their trees with symbols of prosperity -- a fruitful harvest, coins for wealth and various charms such as those for love or fertility. Scandinavian Pagans are thought to be the first to bring their decorated trees indoors as this provided a warm and welcoming environment for the native fairy folk and tree elementals to join in the festivities. The Saxons, a Germanic pagan tribe, were the first to place lights on the their trees in the form of candles. Ancient Romans decorated their homes with greens at the Festival of Saturnalia, their New Year and exchanged evergreen branches with friends as a sign of good luck.
I don't expect people of other faiths (or no faith at all) to celebrate the Birth of Jesus or his Crucifixion and Resurection, but I wish they would just ignore the holiday, and let the 80 - 90 percent of us that do believe in Him, to have our celebration.
Karen Hughes
First (6:44 AM) Blogs for Bush reported that the Star Telegram reported Karen Hughes is coming back to the White House.
Later (10:43 am) Michelle Malkin referred to an AP report which indicated:
President Bush will nominate one of his closest longtime advisers to a key State Department post in an effort to help repair the United States' image abroad, especially in the Arab world, a senior administration official said Saturday.Karen is a wonderful person, and I am very happy to see her back, but since she has much more experience in domestic matters, I wish she was helping to sell private accounts, and letting others with more international experience work on promoting democracy in the Middle East. Even the left wing Josh Marshall seems to agree. Dan Froomkin discussed Karen's return vs Karl Rove in detail with lots of links.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the announcement that Bush has selected Karen Hughes to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs will be made early next week, possibly as early as Monday. The position requires Senate confirmation.
The official said that Hughes, 48, will spearhead the administration's campaign to promote democracy in the Middle East.
Brian Nichols is in custody
Brian Nichols, the man that killed a judge, a court reporter, a deputy sheriff, and a Customs Agent in Atlanta, is now in custody. He probably would have also called the assistant DA, but she was 90 seconds away from the courtroom when he shot the others. He had been caught with two shanks on his last visit to court, so the judge ordered more security. I wonder what security he had before, if one small, armed, 50 year old deputy was considered to be more security. I am also amazed that the green car they were looking for all day yesterday turned up in the same parking garage as it was carjacked (just one floor down).
At least this incident got the police's attention, because when they finally tracked him down they did a complete search of him, including looking under his tongue, behind his ears, etc, and they then transported him to the local FBI office, rather than having the local police try to hold onto him.
Update March 13: NYT reports Long before the carnage that Brian Nichols is accused of unleashing Friday at the Fulton County Courthouse - killing a judge, a court reporter and a sheriff's deputy - the jail where he was housed and the courtroom where the first shootings occurred were beset with security problems..... Last week's rampage and the circumstances surrounding it have given rise to a chorus of criticism from judges, lawyers and law enforcement experts, who say that security in the courthouse, which is the responsibility of the Fulton County sheriff's office, has been too lax for too long..... One senior judge flatly blamed the sheriff's office, telling Atlanta's major daily newspaper, The Journal-Constitution, that it was "absolutely ludicrous" for an armed deputy to have been alone with a potentially violent and much bigger prisoner.
Google Searches
Google offers site-specific searches
Thanks to Ken Leebow you should also check out Soople for
- Normal Google search
- Search for a topic
- Search in multiple sites at once
- Search within one site or domain
- Filter search for filetype
- Specific image search (filetype, size, domain)
- Definitions
- Search in latest news
- Translate text
- Scholar Search (search only in scholarly literature)
- Search in language/country
- Search by number (UPS/Fedex tracking number, Patent numbers)
- Search for sites that relate to a specific site
- Search for movie reviews
- Search for stocks in 5 finance sites
- Look who's linking to your site
Update 3/16 Google Adds New Tool Amid Local Search War reports Google released on Tuesday a free tool that allows businesses to add or update business listing information, such as operating hours and addresses, that appears within its local search results. The Local Business Center tool is available to U.S. businesses, including those that do not operate an Internet site, potentially expanding the reach of its service. Search providers aim to have consumers use local search to find nearby restaurants, stores or service providers, like dry cleaners or plumbers. Local search is currently one of the most competitive markets in the booming Internet search industry as providers eye potential profits from search advertising.
eWeek reports Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, would not quantify the company's investment in the segment but said it had recently stepped up efforts, adding a local search tab to the Google.com home page and integrating maps and business information.
Symantec Set To Raise Prices In Late Summer
Forbes reports that Piper Jaffray predicts that even though Microsoft is expected to have a mid-summer Beta release of an antivirus product, Symantec is expected to raise prices on its security products in late summer.
Reading Blogs
Gallup has released a new poll indicating
Very few Americans read them with any frequency
Three-quarters of the U.S. public uses the Internet at work, school, or home, but only one in four Americans are either very familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs (the shortened form of the original "Web logs"). More than half, 56%, have no knowledge of them. Even among Internet users, only 32% are very or somewhat familiar with blogs.
Mystery Pollster said No, the collective reach of blogs is nowhere near that of television or print media, but focusing on the relatively small percentages misses the rapidly growing influence of the blog readership in absolute terms. The 12% that say they read political blogs at least a few times a month amount to roughly 26 million Americans. That may not make blogs a "dominant" news source, but one American in ten ads up to a lot of influence.
Mickey Kaus with Slate responds that Mystery Pollster notes that if 12% of Americans really read political blogs, as Gallup reports, that's not a small number. It's an astonishingly large number. (I would have guessed 3%.)
Cori Dauber notes if we were only to invert Gallup's phrasing, a quite simple rhetorical move, we get a figure of one quarter of all Americans already familiar to some degree with blogs, one third of all Internet users. Pretty good for a medium in its infancy, which Gallup admits is already influencing the "insiders."
Tom Biro said Obviously I'm biased as a blogger, but I have to say that my on-top-of-it-ness has significantly increased since I began reading and writing weblogs, and the large number of people using instant messaging devices and software has changed the way we learn about what's going on around us. So while Americans may not be directly aware of what blogs are, that doesn't mean they don't know people who are bloggers. Those bloggers could be, in some circles, viewed as influencers (or "sneezers" if you like Seth Godin), spewing forth the news and info that they learn on a daily (hourly?) basis to their circle of contacts. I'd be interested to see some measurement of this "speed" that information is now being disseminated, as compared to the same type of thing two or three years ago.
Deacon notes only about 6 percent read such blogs at least a few times a week. Why is this good news? Because it shows how much room for growth political blogs have. In this regard, blog readership is significantly higher among those in the 18-29 age group. This group made up 17 percent of the sample but 25 percent of blog readers.
Andrew Sullivan notes Two points from me: I'm struck by the youth of blog readers, their relative influence and wealth, and, again, the overwhelmingly male cast of the readership. Susan Estrich can't ascribe that to Mike Kinsley's bias. All in all: skewing young, educated, wealthy, politically balanced (39 percent Dems, 35 percent Republicans or Libertarians, 19 percent Independents), and influential. An advertizer's dream.
As Terry Heaton notes the study's useful as a snapshot, but it'll be more useful if it's repeated next year. The trendline is what's important.
On a related point Kevin Drum references a very interesting study by Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance about blog behavior available in a PDF file and shows this cool blogo-diagram
- The conservative blogosphere has a generally denser web of relationships than the liberal blogosphere.
- However, it also includes the least connected major blogs. In the bottom diagram, the only large blogs without a single connection are both on the right: Andrew Sullivan and RealClear Politics.
- Generally speaking, there aren't very many ongoing relationships between right and left. You only need five links to get a connection in the middle diagram, but even so there are only three connections between right and left: Sullivan-Marshall, Sullivan-Kos, and Volokh-Crooked Timber.
I highly recommend study of both the PDF file and Kevin's analysis. You may also want to study the results from the Blogads Reader Survey
If Gallup (or anyone else) had done a poll shortly after Johannes Gutenberg came out with the Printing Press would it have shown that more people got their news from newspapers or the Town Crier? And what would the results be today?
Friday, March 11, 2005
Outsourcing
Yahoo! News reports that McDonald's Corp. is looking into using remote call centers to take customer orders in an effort to improve service at its drive-throughs. "If you're in L.A.... and you hear a person with a North Dakota accent taking your order, you'll know what we're up to," McDonald's Chief Executive Jim Skinner told analysts at the Bear Stearns Retail, Restaurants & Apparel Conference in New York. Call center professionals with "very strong communication skills" could help boost order accuracy and ultimately speed up the time it takes customers to get in and out of the drive-throughs, the company said.
I have heard many people complaining about companies that outsource their technical support calls to India. IndiaTimes reports India is becoming a major information technology research hub of the world, according to Kiran Karnik, president of Nasscom. And Call Center India says there are more than 425 Call Centers in India that are expected to cross $5.1-billion revenue mark this year. IndiaDaily even reports Outsourcing phone sex from call centers in India!
Let us hope they don't also outsource fast food sales to India as well.
Sciavo Case
ABC News reports that Michael Schiavo rejected a California businessman's offer to pay him $1 million to give up his right to decide her medical treatment.
Thursday's offer, which the husband's attorney labeled "offensive," came hours after a judge refused to let the state's social services agency intervene a move that would have delayed next week's scheduled removal of the tube.
Other such offers, including one for $10 million, had already been made and rejected by Michael Schiavo, said his attorney, George Felos.
Even if the husband did walk away, Felos said, there is still a court order requiring removal of the tube at 1 p.m. next Friday. A judge ordered that the feedings be stopped after finding "clear and convincing" evidence that she would not want to be kept alive in her current state.
Judge George Greer denied a request by the state Department of Children & Families to delay that order for 60 days so it can investigate allegations of abuse and neglect against Michael Schiavo.
The judge said the allegations had already been investigated and found to be groundless. He said the agency was apparently trying to pull an end run around the court by getting involved at this late stage.
SFGate reported San Diego businessman Robert Herring, who founded an electronics company and later a cable and satellite channel, said he felt "compelled" to try to have the husband transfer the legal right to decide his wife's medical treatment to the parents, Bob and Mary Schindler.
"I believe very strongly that there are medical advances happening around the globe that very shortly could have a positive impact on Terri's condition," Herring said.
Herring's offer is valid until Monday, according to a statement from his attorney, Gloria Allred. The money has been deposited into a trust account at Allred's Los Angeles law firm, the statement said.
Felos said his client would not consider any such proposals.
"Michael has said over and over again that this case is not about money for him," Felos said. "It's about carrying out his wife's wishes. There is no amount of money anyone can offer that will cause him to turn his back on his wife."
This is a sad case, and however it turns out, it points out that people should never depend on verbal end-of-life wishes, but that everyone should have a Living Will, such as that available here or here or here or here or here or here.
Lesson on the Filibuster
Hat tip to Blogs for Bush for pointing to what Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (out-going Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee) said in GOP Senator Offers a Lesson on the Filibuster.
Before 2003, no majority supported judicial nomination had been defeated by a filibuster. Under our Rule 22, we did vote on motions to end debate on judicial nominations, though we did so just 15 times in 35 years. Simply taking a cloture vote, however, does not mean a filibuster is underway. In fact, some of those cloture votes were used deliberately to prevent filibusters, clearing the procedural path and guaranteeing an up or down confirmation vote....
Before 2003, only one judicial nomination on which cloture was not invoked was not confirmed. Opposition to cloture on the controversial 1968 nomination of Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice was evenly bipartisan and showed that the nominee lacked clear majority support.....
Before 2003, if the Senate rejected a judicial nomination that reached the Senate floor, we did so by voting it down; filibusters did not prevent a final vote in order to keep a nomination from confirmation.....
Those who want to end this Senate tradition of giving judicial nominations reaching the Senate floor an up or down vote fear they will lose if we follow that tradition. To them, the end of defeating President Bush’s judicial nominations justifies the means of destroying Senate tradition. Being honest about it would reveal how such partisan strategies are politicizing the judicial appointment process, so they try to make other arguments.
They claim Republicans filibustered President Clinton’s judicial nominations, but each of his judicial nominees on whom we took a cloture vote is today a sitting federal judge.
They claim they don’t filibuster very often, which is beside the point if using the filibuster against judicial nominations violates constitutional principles and departs from Senate tradition. There have already been enough judicial nomination filibusters to give President Bush the lowest appeals court confirmation rate of any president since Franklin Roosevelt.
Or they claim they filibuster only nominees who are out of some kind of mainstream. It is difficult to know what that charge really means, especially since the American Bar Association, which Democrats once considered the gold standard, has found them qualified.....
Filibusters of Legislation and of Judicial Nominations are Not the Same
Mr. President, the Senator from West Virginia next equated filibusters of judicial nominations with filibusters of legislation. His policy arguments in favor of the filibuster, however, apply only to the legislative process. He said, for example, that without the filibuster “there exists no leverage with which to bargain for the offering of an amendment. All force to effect compromise between the parties will be lost.” .... this notion obviously applies where the Senate either fashions or affects legislation, but it is irrelevant to nominations
Democrats' history on filibusters belies their current stance indicated In terms of personal history, Byrd left out a few facts of great saliency in his speech. In his long litany of majority abuses, he failed to note his own past history as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a group dedicated to the abuse of a minority of the citizenry.
Further, he didn't note his own association with the most infamous and longest filibuster in the Senate's history: the 534-hour, 1-minute and 51-second attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Of course, mentioning either of those facts wouldn't have exactly bolstered his argument.
Even of more significance than these embarrassing incidents from Byrd's past is the fact that despite his protestations that the rights of the minority to debate in the Senate should be sacrosanct, it was Byrd himself, as Senate minority whip in 1975, who successfully led the charge to lower the threshold for stopping a filibuster from 67 votes to 60 votes.
Such a move diminished the power of the minority party (then the Republicans), a cause that Byrd now paints himself as the champion of.
Further, in a debate in 1979 over the rules of the chamber Byrd argued that each new Congress had the right to change the rules made by previous Congresses. He stated specifically "this Congress is not obliged to be bound by the dead hand of the past."
Yet he is now arguing that rules from the past cannot be altered.
It should be noted the filibuster is not a constitutional right, but rather one that derives from the rules of the chamber itself. And, as noted above, those rules have been altered from time to time.
Indeed, the closest thing to this issue in the Constitution is the fact that "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings" (Article I, Section 5, Clause 2). That clause indicates that any given Congress can change its own rules as it sees fit.
Beyond the issue of Byrd's remarkable hypocrisy on these issues is the fact that he is being blatantly disingenuous about what the Republicans and Democrats want at this moment in time. He claims, especially in his Post column, that the Democrats want the ability to debate, while the Republicans seek to squelch debate.
This is demonstrably false.
If all Sen. Byrd and the Senate Democrats want is a debate, then they can have it. The Republican majority is not adverse to a debate; indeed, what the Democrats are currently filibustering is a debate about these nominees, because the goal of the filibuster is to block the nominations from reaching the floor, which is where debate takes place.
The debate now, if one wants to call it that, is a debate over whether to have a debate about these nominees. It is, therefore, the Democrats who are blocking debate.
If this was about debate, then the Democrats could take the floor and attempt to employ their persuasive powers to try and change the minds of some of the majority, or to use the press to transmit their views to the public in hopes that the public, in turn, would pressure the majority.
However, this is not about defending the right of the minority to debate (they have that now). It is about the right to outright block the president's nominees (which they have been exercising for several years now).
Since they appear to assume that their persuasive powers are inadequate, they have chosen to use the filibuster rule as a blunt instrument that cuts off debate, rather than enhancing it.
The goal is the destruction of these nominations, plain and simple.
Ultimately the Democrats face some hard choices: either compromise on some of the nominees, or force the hand of the Republicans on the "nuclear" option. Democrats are betting that if the Republicans go nuclear, that they will be able to win the PR war by shutting down the Senate in protest.
However, they should check their congressional history: Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich shut down the government over a budget dispute with President Clinton in late 1995/early 1996.
But the strategy backfired and Gingrich was never the same again, politically speaking.
Fatwa against Osama
CNN reported Muslim clerics in Spain issued what they called the world's first fatwa, or Islamic edict, against Osama bin Laden on Thursday, the first anniversary of the Madrid train bombings, calling him an apostate and urging others of their faith to denounce the al Qaeda leader.
The ruling was issued by the Islamic Commission of Spain, the main body representing the country's 1 million-member Muslim community. The commission represents 200 or so mostly Sunni mosques, or about 70 percent of all mosques in Spain......
The fatwa said that according to the Quran "the terrorist acts of Osama bin Laden and his organization al Qaeida ... are totally banned and must be roundly condemned as part of Islam."
It added: "Inasmuch as Osama bin Laden and his organization defend terrorism as legal and try to base it on the Quran ... they are committing the crime of 'istihlal' and thus become apostates that should not be considered Muslims or treated as such."
The Arabic term "istihlal" refers to the act of making up one's own laws.
Wiki
Washington Post said Blogging Clicks With Colleges Interactive Web Pages Changing Class Participation but they really were not talking about blogging, but rather about Wikis.
The wiki, which got its name from the Hawaiian word for "quick," is the scrappy little brother to the blog, an interactive Web page that can be changed by anyone who stumbles upon it. While blogs let people publish their thoughts online, wikis take things a step further, creating freewheeling, collaborative communities: Students can edit one another's work, bounce ideas around or link to infinite other Web sites...... Wikis, including interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia, have been around for several years but they're just on the cusp of becoming mainstream; as the technology improves, they're popping up in a few classrooms and offices, and people are finding all sorts of uses for them.
Get a dog instead
The Associated Press reported Cat Shoots Owner
BATES TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) -- A man cooking in his kitchen was shot after one of his cats knocked his 9mm handgun onto the floor, discharging the weapon, Michigan State Police said. Joseph Stanton, 29, of Bates Township in Iron County, was shot in his lower torso around 6 p.m. Tuesday, the state police post in Iron River reported. He was transported to Iron County Community Hospital..... State police said he was cooking at his stove when the cat knocked the loaded gun off the kitchen counter behind him.
Dawn Patrol reported it as well, and Wind Rider commented I have had a few cats pull a switch blade on me as they did not want me to get up while they were sleeping on my chest as I watched T.V. but the idea of a cat packing heat really scares the devil out of me. I think that the National Rifle Association is going to have to take action here before this gets out of hand. I seriously doubt that the cat even had any gun safety instruction.
Activists decry finding
The Globe and Mail reported Rumsfeld cleared in prison abuse scandal; activists decry finding
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon's top brass were exonerated yesterday of accusations that they ordered, or turned a blind eye to, the brutal torture and humiliation of detainees at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
That was not what some on the left wanted to hear. The Bush Haters were desperate for the report to say that President George W. Bush had set a permissive and extralegal tone for the war on terrorism, and the truth just did not satisfy them.
These were the same people that were so quiet recently when people started saying Bush was right
2008 looks good
As GOP Bloggers indicated the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, has released their latest poll showing the Republicans having an early lead for the 2008 White House Race.
2008 looks good.
No substitute for journalism
As Dawn Patrol pointed out the Baltimore Sun carries an anti-blogging op-ed by Christopher Hanson, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland entitled No substitute for journalism (As Dawn indicates, if you want to read the article but don't want to go through the Sun's registration process, use the e-mail address "bugmenot90@mailinator.com" and the password "bugmenot" (both sans quotation marks). E-mail address and password come via BugMeNot.com.)
Professor Hanson said: [B]loggers hastened Dan Rather's retirement as CBS news anchor by questioning the authenticity of documents he had relied on in a report critical of President Bush. Blogger agitation also led CNN News Chief Eason Jordan to resign last month for supposedly stating without evidence that U.S. troops had, in effect, executed journalists in Iraq. There is no denying that the bloggers are a powerful force in the information world. But at least for now, they are no substitute for mainstream journalism, despite its flaws. A great many bloggers are either too self-absorbed to focus on keeping the public informed or too skewed by ideology to put factual accuracy front and center.
And yet they exposed Dan Rather and Eason Jordon, something the Main Stream Media (MSM) did not do.
And in any event, I don't know of any bloggers that consider themselves as a substitute for mainstream journalism. I certainly don't consider myself as a substitute, but I do consider myself, and even more so the many good bloggers whose work I read and comment on, as useful supplements to mainstream journalism. And since most of the Mainstream Media (MSM) are very far to the left, a good conservative blogger can give a different perspective on things.
Many of the best journalists have impact because they expose serious abuses of power, as in Watergate, by painstakingly verifying their facts. But, perversely enough, bloggers' impact often derives from reckless impatience - a rush to shoot first and verify later, usually driven by ideological zeal.
And as just indicated in the case of Dan Rather and Eason Jordon, they accomplish the same result.
Take Clinton-hater Drudge,
Professor, I believe that is what in Journalism class is called an Ad Hominem Attack. Is this a technique taught at the the University of Maryland?
whose online "scoop" about the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky was essentially a rumor. Because the story later turned out to be true, Mr. Drudge suddenly was elevated to media icon, kitchen table giant killer, radio and TV star. No matter that he had also reported a series of false rumors. One can't expect a cyber-cowboy to match the standards that apply to a Dan Rather!
Would that be the same Dan Rather whose producer was fired, and where three other high executives were "asked to resign", and who himself was forced to retire early because of pushing a story using fake documents attempting to control a Presidential election?
Consider the Eason Jordan affair. Even today it is unclear precisely what the CNN exec said, or intended to say, during a January panel discussion in Switzerland. Mr. Jordan insisted afterward that he had meant U.S. soldiers had recklessly targeted individuals, not knowing they were journalists. But a sketchy Web posting by a conference participant said Mr. Jordan had accused soldiers of deliberate journocide. No transcript was available.
Even so, a brigade of conservative bloggers, incensed by CNN's "liberal bias," bellowed for Mr. Jordan's blood and got it, vigilante style, with the facts still murky - an approach that would have resulted in failing grades in any journalism school. Lynch Bloggers want to have big-league journalistic impact but to avoid ethical standards they apply so vigorously to mainstream reporters.
As I recall there was a tape of the session, and the main thing the bloggers were pushing for was for the tape to be played. Would mainstream reporters, replete with all of their ethical standards, not want to hear the actual tape if someone said someone else said something?
The Blogosphere does wonders as a forum for debate, political and social "networking" and wild creative expression. But it is not realizing its potential to backstop mainstream news coverage with solid, factual grass-roots journalism - the kind most acutely required where cash-strapped, short-staffed newspapers fail to scrutinize government and business while ratings-crazed TV stations chase carnage.
If newspapers are cash-strapped and short-staffed, where do you expect bloggers, who are usually individuals, to come up with expense money to back up those newspapers? And how are they to get Press Passes? Jeff Gannon got a DayPass at the White House, but could not get a regular pass, and he was not a blogger, but rather a paid reporter for Talon News. The first blogger to get one was a left wing gossip blogger, and he had the support of some of the left wing main stream media outlets.
As Dennis, a 2nd-year seminarian for the Diocese of Memphis, said in a comment on Dawn Patrol: Deriding bloggers because they are not good journalists is like deriding novelists for not being better poets, or complaining that the local Baptist preacher doesn't include a formal epiclesis in his worship service. It's different medium. Hanson seems to misunderstand what's going on. Sure, some bloggers have a pretense of journalism. Other bloggers keep a diary or journal. Others do some of both, and from day to day you don't know what you'll get at a given blog. All of life does not consist of just one kind of conversation.
And as Andrea Harris commented: "Calling blogging 'no substitute for mainstream journalism, despite its flaws...'"
Nice misdirection, there, Mr. Hanson. The only people bleating about blogs attempting to "substitute" for mainstream journalism are the mainstream journalists who have been coasting on the automatic regard their positions get, and are now feeling threatened because they can no longer avoid the fact that there are "amateurs" out there who not only write better than they do, but don't care what "the mainstream" thinks about it. I'm not even going to bother with the rest of the article.
