Good news in Montana. From The Advocate:
The Montana university system's policy of denying employees' same-sex partners the health insurance available to heterosexual workers' spouses is unconstitutional, the Montana supreme court ruled in a 4-3 decision Thursday.
You won't find Amazon's Customer Service number anywhere on its website.
Amazon sees no reason to apologize for its decision to leave the customer-service phone number off its Web site. "We've found that customers really do appreciate the self-service features we've got," said Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman.Not everyone agrees. An underground movement to publicize Amazon's customer-service number, 800-201-7575, along with other numbers for Amazon noted on Ms. [Ellen] Hobb's site, has spread across the Web.
From Customer Service: The Hunt for a Human in the Circuit's section of today's New York Times. Bet they change it?
Think Secret says a $499 Mac (sans monitor) will be announced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld Expo on January 11.
No such thing as clear analysis of the season's holiday shopping sales results as companies spin, spin, spin. But one thing seems obvious to me. The rich are richer and the poor poorer:
Coach was a clear holiday winner, as the luxury goods maker said Monday that its holiday sales grew 25 percent, or 2 percent better than it projected. Merrill Lynch analyst Daniel Barry told clients in a note Monday that the pre-Christmas sales surge benefited luxury the most, while UBS said Tuesday that it expects "strong relative peer performance" from luxury retailers Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue. At the other end of the price spectrum, discount giant Wal-Mart Stores said December same-store sales, or sales in stores open at least a year, are tracking at the midpoint of its 1 percent to 3 percent increase.Concern over the Bentonville, Ark.-based dismal November sales and the effect of higher gas prices on its customers' discretionary spending had cast doubt on its holiday sales prospects.
Doug got a new Dell laptop for Christmas. It came with the positively reviewed Word Perfect Office 12. The suite's Microsoft-compatibility features aren't perfect, "All the buttons are different." He wants Microsoft Office.
The good news is he loaded Firefox right away.
I'm just back from lunch with friends from my old job and stomping ground, LMC-TV in Mamaroneck, New York. It was great catching up. One is teaching English as a Second Language courses in the Bronx, and after explaining how literacy programs have been systematically defunded, will begin doing literacy work there next month. The other is volunteering through a retired professional organization to help people with problematic backgrounds return to the workforce.
We talked about my blog - why I blog and how I built my blog - and they asked why I don't blog on a single topic. They were on to something. From Bruce Bartlett:
In my first commentary, I noted that journalists like Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and Matt Drudge, as well as publications such as National Review, The American Prospect and Reason magazine had established blogs. Last year, I noted the growing number of academics who were commenting regularly in this form, including Brad Delong (Cal-Berkeley), Eugene Volokh and Steve Bainbridge (both of UCLA), Glenn Reynolds (U/Tennessee), Steve Antler (Roosevelt U.), and Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University. What I have discovered in the past year is that there is increasing specialization among bloggers, with more staking out narrow areas of commentary. (Emphasis mine.)
Hm. Maybe I should find a specialty. (Via Instapundit.)
I was interested to read Jerome Armstrong's update on the race for DNC Chair (it's Dean's to lose; I still like Fowler). While looking back at some of what Armstrong has written I ran across this:
We already sucked it up and got Harry Reid for the Red State Minority Leader in the Senate, give us a break with the condescending remarks about wanting Southern and Midwestern values for the DNC. I'll stack up the West Coast-Northeastern coalition of freedom-for-all, morality-for-all, and liberty-for-all global values against those Red State regional resentments of moral superiority anytime, anyplace, and make the right choice. We want a Democratic Leader from a Democratic state.
From the red red center of a very Red State, I wholeheartedly agree.
Breakfast out has always been a pleasure of mine. For years and years I had daily breakfast at West Side Storey at 95th and Columbus. When it closed I moved to the Key West Diner. When I moved to Brooklyn, it was blueberry pancakes at The Park Cafe each weekend. Here, there's Waffle House or Huddle House. They're worlds away from the breakfasts I knew. The ratio of cars to pickup trucks in the parking lot is one indicator. The fact that a majority of the folks inside are advocates of smokers' rights is another. No 'No Smoking' sections here.
The price is the same but the surroundings are decidedly more downscale. The omelettes, drenched as they are in pools of butter, are a local favorite. The people eating them don't look so healthy. Every six months or so we decide that we'll give it a try. But it is what it is and try as I might, I don't enjoy it. What's worse is that if a place I'd like were to open it would fail. The people here wouldn't like it. So for today it's Raisin Bran or Instant Oatmeal at home for me.
We're off to the North for a holiday visit. I'll be blogging I'm sure, but less so. Happy Holidays everyone.
After being broadcast for a dozen years without incident, today NPR cut the gay Snowball flirtation scene from the David Sedaris reading of The Santaland Diaries on NPR. Via Outside the Tent, AmericaBlog, Eschaton.
The Left Behind series was featured on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer Monday night, and Nightline last night. With 71 percent of their readers from the South and Midwest, and just 6 percent from the Northeast, The Newshour said they've sold 66 million copies. Nightline said 40 million. Whichever, they sold a lot. The latest installment is number 24 on the NYTimes' paperback fiction list. I guess that's what merits all the attention; pandering to red staters has nothing to do with it.
The title refers to the sinners left behind when Jesus returns for the Saved. Tim LaHaye (I dig his Flash intro) and Jerry B. Jenkins wrote the apocalyptic prophecy series featuring an anti-Christ who heads the UN, his assistant the Pope, Jews converting to Christianity, and a conquering Jesus who wins a climactic battle in which thousands are slaughtered. It's made the authors rich. And what of the poor? From a May 24 Newsweek cover story:
How does [LaHaye] reconcile [his fat profits] with Jesus' injunction to sell all you have and give to the poor? "I can accomplish far more from my present lifestyle and the giving that I do to Christian work," he says. "If I just sold everything and gave it to the poor, I can't see where that would advance the Gospel as much as I'm doing." But wouldn't it advance the poor? "Well," he says, "you know how much I pay in taxes?"
Jon Stewart is Entertainment Weekly's Entertainer of the Year. As good a reason as any to recall his Crossfire appearance (click here to watch the video, here for the transcript). If you missed it, he called Tucker Carlson a "dick." More importantly, he said shows like Crossfire are "hurting America." They are!
Side note: Will Tucker really leave CNN? Wonkette thinks not.
Congress is no longer the clubby place it once was, where senators and congressmen from either side of the aisle could put away their partisan differences and socialize after hours. That's too bad too because the camaraderie was useful in bringing opposing sides together on compromise that moved legislation forward.
Meanwhile, the club is alive and well, thriving like never before, among the celebrity journalist class. A little more partisan rancor in the Fourth Estate could lead to a more informed public; there camaraderie helps keep us in the dark on important issues of the day. A case in point, from the Washington Monthly Cover Story on conservative columnist and TV pundit Bob Novak:
Colleagues like [Paul] Begala say that they don't question Novak about the Plame case out of personal loyalty. “Look, he's a friend of mine,� Begala said to me. “I know that he can't talk about it. I respect that fact, so I don't bring it up.�
If that's not bad enough:
But there's another reason they don't ask. Novak won't let them. The topic hasn't come up on “The Capital Gang,� for instance, because, according to one source at CNN, “Bob is the executive producer and he has more say than anybody else…He won't talk about it.� Novak's role at the show means that he gets to determine what subjects do—and, more importantly, do not—get discussed. But couldn't one of the other panelists bring it up, even so? “You have to understand,� said the source, “this is Bob's show. He's the boss.�
Earlier books raised the question but didn't seem convincing. This one is. Unfortunately, it's tainted:
"In researching Lincoln, Mr. Tripp created a vast database of cross-indexed material, now available at the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Ill. He began the book working with the writer Philip Nobile, but they fell out. Mr. Nobile has charged that Mr. Tripp plagiarized material written by him and fabricated evidence of Lincoln's homosexuality. "Tripp's book is a fraud," Mr. Nobile said in an interview. He declined to say what was fraudulent, however, because he said he was writing his own article about it.
Nobile was part of the Doris Kearns Goodwin plagiarism story. I'll be interested to read his article.
Kevin Drum on how improbable it is that we'll be in Iraq for only one year more.
Today there's this in Georgia news: two Southern heritage groups, The Military Order of the Stars and Bars and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, are upset because Savannah Mayor Otis Johnson (who is black) authorized the removal of two portraits of Confederate army officers from City Hall to make way for television equipment needed to televise council meetings. A lawsuit is threatened.
Despite plans for the paintings of Gen. Robert E. Lee and John Wheaton, a former mayor, to be placed in the Savannah History Museum, leaders of these heritage groups see Johnson's action as another wave in the steady erosion of their history."We feel like the mayor is in violation of the law and we intend to pursue that," Newman said. "Because the portraits were (originally) placed in memorial of the individuals and the statute says that they are not to be disturbed."The statute is a state law that cites memorials and monuments in honor of military service - including from the Civil War - cannot be removed. Heritage groups cling to this law and are using it to sue the Augusta Commission, who removed a Confederate flag from a display at Riverwalk Augusta.
A little over a year ago there was the flap over Howard Dean saying that he wanted to be the candidate of the "guys with confederate flags in their pickup trucks." At the time I agreed with Dean. My experiences since then have changed my mind. Let the Republicans keep them. (More in the extended entry.)
Your Blog or Mine, NYTimes, Sunday, Dec. 19:
There are as many different kinds of blogs as there are human impulses -- sex blogs, dating blogs, political blogs, technology blogs and music blogs. But 70 to 80 percent are varieties of personal journals. A few have broken into the Technorati Top 100: for example, dooce, No. 39, advertises herself as ''that girl who lost her job'' and ''managed to alienate her family because of her Web site.'' (You can click the links to read the nasty things she said about her parents and colleagues that got her into trouble.) Although men and women blog in roughly equal numbers, personal bloggers are more likely to be women than men. And the favorite topic of personal bloggers is sex.
Jay Rosen, of "Public Journalism" fame, in a long post about the active blog community in Greensboro, North Carolina where the local newspaper, the Greensboro News-Record, is looking to make its website into an online community, has a great list of suggestions for any newspaper's website:
* Change policy from the industry standard, "never link out in news stories" to the new standard, "always link out."* Change this page: There needs to be a free archive from now on. Articles get one url and that remains the url forever, with a powerful directory to find stuff. "Now your fine work will be in Google," you tell the staff. "The knowledge platform of our time."* Create one or two blogs, the main purpose of which is not to project the author's knowledge (or opinion) "out there," but to draw knowledge from its dispersed location around town and around the Web. These would be weblogs founded in the faith the Dan Gillmor is right when he says: "My readers know more than I do." They are primarily learning machines run by a journalist from the newspaper. A simple example would be a drug pricing blog.* Create a home (bio) page and stable url for every journalist on staff, with a goal for having 100 percent of your bylines linked to live bio pages, updated by the staffers themselves. Then begin experimenting with transparency by asking staffers to explain "who they are, where they've been and where they're coming from," but limiting it to those willing to disclose. In a story like this, Jennifer Fernandez's name would be clickable, (it isn't now) and we could find out something about her. Watch as some of the bio pages evolve into blogs.* You want to be the public square, News-Record? Then keep a running list on the front of your site with the twelve most important, vital, involving and humanly real stories in the Greensboro area, and if some of them are problems that remain on the list for years, so be it. The Big 12 in GSO. Move one off when it's decided or solved or it fades. Change it weekly. Change it monthly. Make it six instead of twelve. It doesn't matter how you do it, what you call it. All that matters is that your list be "live," capable of changing on a dime or not changing for years-- and of course, it has to be accurate. How's it going to be accurate? Only if your site is two-way. Only if you're in touch. Only if you're good.
I found it via oxblog who also pointed me to this fine post in The Moderate Voice.
At last some common sense at Homeland Security. From the NYTimes today, "Responding to repeated calls from big-city mayors, the Department of Homeland Security is shifting a larger share of its annual $3.5 billion in antiterrorism grants to the nation's largest cities." Memphis isn't happy, "We are a prime location, a prime target, any way you look at it." No, they're not! Neither is Wyoming, which got more per capita in terrorism grants this year than New York.
I like the Washington Post, I like Slate, it sounds good to me. (Now maybe Slate writers will have an easier time getting paid.) In announcing the sale, editor Jacob Weisberg said, "Slate is not going to be merged, submerged, bent, folded, spindled, or mutilated." Today, the NYTimes says of Slate:
The sale completes Slate's transformation from an experiment in the new media in 1996 to a respected brand name in journalism...Although Slate has never achieved steady profitability, it is credited with helping to shape Web publishing as well as pioneering the use of hyperlinks and Web logs. It has been recognized with a National Magazine Award for its editorial content, and its coverage is routinely cited by mainstream news publications.
Kos reports that the most aggressive candidate for DNC Chair is Donnie Fowler and pointed to his website, ChangeTheParty.com, and this C-SPAN interview (watch with Real Player). I watched and it sold me on Donnie. He started off with, "God does not belong to the Republican party, and values don't belong to the Right Wing and patriotism doesn't belong to George Bush." When he was questioned aggressively by a few conservative, religious, and anti-gay callers (one managed a mention of Hillary Clinton and Katie Couric, of course) he gave as good as he got. He told a couple of them they should stay with the Republican party.
He's the son of former DNC chairman Don Fowler, from South Carolina, living in San Francisco, was Wesley Clark's first campaign manager, and headed John Kerry's Michigan campaign. He sounds like a fighter; I like that he's young. I don't want a Democratic Party that tries to be Republican-lite in an ill-fated attempt to win the election. I agree with those who say that Republican-lite is a losing proposition because it inherently endorses the Republican agenda and alienates the natural Democratic base. I'll be watching Donnie.
UPDATE: My quick reaction to watching that single interview made me wonder if I was being rash. I went back to this overview of DNC Chair candidates from a significant Democratic meeting held the weekend before last. At the time I was watching Harold Ickes, who I've always liked. I still like him; they didn't. They did like Donnie. I'll comment on Howard Dean in another post.
I'm a Technology Support Specialist at Georgia College & State University. My main area of responsibility is the campus computer labs. I've been noting all the blogger buzz about Firefox, and that tech folks coping with the consequences of IE all recommend it. (For more general anti-Microsoft news, visit The Evil Empire).
My media background ("they all use IE, let's just give them what they want") had me resistant at first to my co-workers universal opinion that we should load Firefox on all our machines. I've come around. As we ready the computer labs for next semester, we're loading Firefox on all of them. We'll see how it goes and may even follow Penn State University's lead and take steps to encourage students to use it.
I recommend you try it. Download it free from here. And for those pages that require IE click here from your installed Firefox browser for the plug-in.
UPDATE: My friend Howard says I'm sooooo behind the times... Also please note, you still need to use IE for Windows Update. Always update!
Athens, home of the University of Georgia (and Doug's hometown) is sometimes called "the Berkeley of the south." Somehow I don't think you'd find this story out of Berkeley:
[University of Georgia Cheerleading coach Marilou] Braswell was fired Aug. 23, two weeks after she read a prepared statement informing cheerleaders that teammate Jaclyn Steele had made allegations of religious discrimination against her. Braswell, who coached for 12 years, claims the athletic association tried to deprive her of her First Amendment freedom of speech and free exercise of religion, as well as 14th Amendment due process and equal protection rights.Braswell, who wiped away tears as Thrash made his ruling, insisted after the hearing "I have never discriminated against anybody."Steele, who is Jewish, and another Jewish cheerleader first complained that Braswell gave unfavorable treatment to non-Christian cheerleaders and others who did not participate in pregame prayers and Bible studies at Braswell's home. The university investigated their complaint and placed Braswell on probation while ordering Steele to be placed on the football cheerleading squad without a tryout.
I love The Washington Monthly, print and blog. My December issue just got here today (in Milledgeville, the mail is slow). A favorite feature, available online, is "Tilting at Windmills" by Founding Editor Charles Peters. One bit of it focused on flu shots:
...the CDC should have the power to order that shots be given first to the people who need them most and then according to a fair system of priority. It also should be able to allocate the vaccine so that supplies are available to meet those priorities. This year's shortage was clear by early October. But the CDC failed to act, and on Oct. 16, a Washington Post headline told us “Flu Vaccine Allocation in Area Haphazard, No System Exists for Haves to Share Supplies with Have-nots.� The CDC should also be responsible for telling people what's going on. As late as Oct. 21, Gardiner Harris of The New York Times reported “local and state officials are complaining that their federal counterparts have given them almost no information to deal with the shortage.� The problem is that the CDC did not want these responsibilities. Its director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, said “imposing federal controls over this process would probably make a big mess.� It was already a big mess, Dr. Gerberding. If government did not fill the need, who would? Some things simply have to be done by the government. The real question is not whether government should do them, but how to make sure government does them right. (Emphasis mine.)Finally, on Nov. 10, Dr. Gerberding overcame her market principles and announced a plan for rationing the vaccine according to need. By this time, the CDC controlled only 10 million of the 50 million shots that were available in early October. Furthermore, the CDC is allowing freelancers like New York mayor Bloomberg to import the vaccine from abroad. Your ability to get a shot may depend less on your need than on the enterprise of your mayor. So far a lot of people have been getting the vaccine who are not exactly priority cases, including many twenty-something congressional aides, not to mention many of their healthier bosses.
The allocation mess never got sorted out. Today USA Today is reporting that some states have extra vaccine and are being advised by the CDC to expand their eligibility pool while other states are not able to immunize their high risk population. The upshot is several million high-risk Americans will not be getting the vaccine.
A good number of folks around here are in general agreement that it's anti-Christian to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Earlier in the season I heard a call on the radio to boycott Macy's because they were saying the offending phrase. Personally, I don't get it. I find it troubling that a gesture towards inclusion is turned into a slight. What do you do with that? Kevin Drum comments on the attention the issue is getting in the mainstream media and wonders how they are so successful at getting their message out and how can liberals copy it?
UPDATE: It Affects You goes off on the fact that Bush started his press conference this morning with happy holidays!
UPDATE: Ross Douthat from The American Scene is guest blogging at AndrewSullivan.com. He chimes in with this.
My gaff last week and its attendant attention sent me out on the web in search of some blogging rules of the road. I didn't find as much as I thought I would. I found these rules for corporate bloggers. I found that while once I was an early adopter now I've come late to the blogging party. And I found that at age 50 I'm a relative rarity in the blogoshpere. USA Today reports that out of an estimated 10 million blogs out there, "about 52% are created by youths ages 10 to 19. Another 40% are created by 20-somethings." (I also found a terrific Online Journalism Review article, a Perseus Survey and a Pew Study which are all cited in the extended entry.)
Andrew Sullivan pointed to this column in the Advocate arguing that Bush's win is a victory for gays. From the first paragraph:
By supporting civil unions for gay couples—which, practically speaking, is the cutting-edge issue in the battle for equality—President Bush has become a leading advocate for gay rights.Say what? I don't think so. I read no further. My Republican friends probably will.
Update: My post could have left the impression that Andrew Sullivan endorsed the article he pointed to. The clickthrough was more ambiguous:
I wonder what Bush really meant when he said he wasn't against civil unions, even though his party platform opposes any legal protections for gay couples. Karl Rove said he meant nothing but some ad hoc legal arrangements, made by private contract, and unenforceable in court if challenged by other family members. I suspect it was merely politics. But I don't know. Why doesn't someone ask the president or McClellan what rights the president believes a civil union should contain. That might move the ball forward. But somehow I doubt we'd get a real answer.
A better blogger wouldn't have needed this clarification. I'll keep working at it.
Lisa Marie Presley has sold Elvis Presley Enterprises, including all trademark rights to the Elvis name, likeness and image, along with all intellectual property and his music publishing catalog. She got $100 million and the house. I can't say that I am much of an Elvis fan. I did enjoy a good number of his movies as a boy with my family at the Harrisburg Drive-In Theater, but I remember him more from the era when critic Peter Graining (quoted from here) wrote:
His hair is dyed, his teeth are capped, his middle is girdled, his voice is a husk, and his eyes film over with glassy impersonality. He is no longer, it seems, used to the air and, because he cannot endure the scorn of strangers, will not go out if his hair isn’t right, if his weight -- which fluctuates wildly -- is not down. He has tantrums onstage and, like some aging politician, is reduced to the ranks of grotesque."
No doubt the man who once disappeared from the stage for several minutes, only to return claiming he had been answering "the call of nature," was a real transformative talent. Unfortunately for all the undiscovered new talent in the world today it's easier, less risky, to repackage his old stuff and all the other old hits, old bands and old movies media companies churn out these days than it is to do anything really new. These repackaged or at best marginally improved re-releases suck up money that could otherwise be spent finding, developing, grooming and promoting new talent.
Me, I won't be buying.
Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, has a new project. HearUsNow.org: Consumer Voice for Communications Choices. The ste has sections dedicated to cell phones, TV Radio & Cable, and Broadband & Internet. We're all spending big bucks on these services, we need to be aware of the issues and we need the means to have our voices heard. This site will help. From their press release:
To help consumers navigate the ever-changing telecommunications landscape – from filing a complaint about their cell phone bill to understanding DTV – Consumers Union Thursday will launch a one-of-a-kind web site, www.HearUsNow.org, that follows our long tradition of promoting a fair and just marketplace.
As a portal to information from hundreds of community and national groups, the site will empower consumers by providing the latest in media telecom news and advice, and provide the tools to take action for better and more affordable media, telephone, cable and Internet services or equipment.
Doug forwarded Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times and said "blog on." The column, 2004: Year of 'The Passion', has to be read in its entirety, but it touches on something I've been baffled by lately, the Christian predisposition towards feeling persecuted:
...if you watch the news and listen to certain politicians, especially since Election Day, you'll hear an ever-growing drumbeat that Christianity is under siege in America. Like Mr. Gibson, the international movie star who portrayed himself as a powerless martyr to a shadowy anti-Christian conspiracy in the run-up to the release of "The Passion," his fellow travelers on the right detect a sinister plot — of secularists, "secular Jews" and "elites" — out to destroy the religion followed by more than fouur out of every five Americans.What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian). "It's theological correctness," says the Rev. Debra Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister who directs a national interfaith group, the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing, and is one of the rare progressive religious voices to get any TV time. She detects an overall "understanding" in the media that religion "is one voice — fundamentalist."
I've enjoyed reading Josh Marshall's commentary about Bernard Kerik's woes (click here and type in "Kerik" for the comprehensive collection), but even in the face of all that I've been hanging on to my original opinion that the guy would have been good at Homeland Security. He's got a colorful background that won't fly in Washington and would have been trouble in New York had it been found out, but still I haven't see anything on how well he did his job. I've heard the nanny stuff, the affairs, some financial stuff, the apartment in Battery Park City and the Baghdad questions (the issue that concerned me most). It's all smarmy and I'm not seriously suggesting that the guy had a chance. How smart is he if he thought he could keep all that from getting out? But who are we going to wind up with? It's a tough important job and he's more the kind of person I want than some Washington bureaucrat or career politician.
A friend sent me this article about Atlanta police closing Naked Boys Singing. Fortunately, by the time I got to read it this story reported that the mayor had come to the rescue. I went to Southern Voice for details, but got distracted by Eminem's ass then somehow ended up here reading about the Dallas kid at the Christian Academy expelled for running a gay personals site. Television's not nearly so interesting.
I just got back from lunch. On the radio I heard an ad asking that we boycott Target and visit Wal-Mart instead. The fundamentalist Christian community is up in arms that Target has banned Salvation Army solicitors from their stores. Even some liberals seem to be upset about the ban, but mainly it's the Christians. Myself, I don't much care. I don't really see it as anti-Christian on Target's part (their corporate statement is here) and if I were to take up the cudgel of free speech in the private sphere, it wouldn't likely be on behalf of an evangelical Christian charity.
It surprised me to hear this locally produced issue advocacy ad on our little country radio station. "Star Station" WLRR 100.7 is a one man operation run from a personal computer out of his home by Craig Baker. The station plays "standards" (in monaural!) that seem so old as to all be in the public domain. I talked to Craig last year when I was looking for work and, as an advocate of local independent media, I was impressed with what he put together and enjoyed what he had to say.
He believes the most important part of his programming is his commercials. He has no DJs so they are the only original content he's got. He goes out and records, edits and writes them on his own, on the spot, with the local merchants. Now that's local radio. The ads all have personality, reflecting this time and place like no other media around here. One of my favorites is for Farmers and Merchants Bank, which is touting how it's now technologically up to date because it just added "telephone banking."
I've listened to the station since I've lived here and Craig was right, I listen for the commercials. Lately I've noticed a decidedly Christian turn to the station. Maybe Craig's found a new market and is selling them ads like hotcakes. Maybe he's playing to his Bible-belt audience. Maybe he's a fundamentalist Christian himself (the topic didn't come up in our conversation though I pointedly mentioned my gay partner). I don't know. What I do know is the station's quite popular; Craig knows his market. And Target knows theirs. My friends, who like me travel to Macon to shop at Target, all want one to open up here. I won't hold my breath.
Everybody's noting SinclairAction.com , a worthy cause. I'm surprised that Sinclair has no stations in Georgia. They're all around us but not in Georgia or Mississippi.
And here I've been worrying that no one would read my blog. Only to find myself cited at Wonkette.
My antipathy to copyright is really about corporate copyright holders. I'd love it if individuals had protections, but I don't believe we do. In the "best-justice-money-can-buy" system, even if you are the copyright holder unless you've got corporate backing, or can generate some special media attention, you're not likely to have the means to defend it. In our corporate media world, increasingly the corporation is the copyright holder. Here's one guy's experience with Microsoft:
A month ago, I wrote a short essay for Slate (which they used). Today in the mail, I received a large envelope full of numerous forms I have to fill out in order to collect the pittance I am owed. Among the highlights, I am asked to sign away world rights to edit, publish, and distribute the material, as well as to irrevocably and unconditionally waive in perpetuity any rights I may have "under any law relating to 'moral rights of authors' or any similar law throughout the world."He didn't sign. Good for him!
A faculty friend formally reported three instances of plagiarism last week. Ironically, the guilty students were all fundamentalist Christian Bush supporters. Doug points out that these "cut-and-paste writers" violated at least two of the Commandments...
Today Instapundit pointed to this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on plagiarism among scholars. Which motivated me to go back and revisit Something Borrowed: Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life from The New Yorker a few weeks back. In it author Malcolm Gladwell uses the experience of his previous New Yorker article "Damaged" (1997) turning up in Bryony Lavery's play "Frozen" to question the cultural assumptions built around plagiarism and finds that "...instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause." He goes through a wonderful discussion of the derivative nature of music and observes:
A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative, and that distinction, I realized, was what was missing from the discussion of Bryony Lavery’s borrowings. Yes, she had copied my work. But no one was asking why she had copied it, or what she had copied, or whether her copying served some larger purpose.And later:
We accept the right of one writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of another—think how many serial-killer novels have been cloned from “The Silence of the Lambs.� Yet, when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with a lawsuit). When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match� a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else’s idea. But had we “matched� any of the Times’ words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
I understand that plagiarism is a real problem that needs to be addressed, but in our technological age where we can lock down content to the point of pay per view, where we buy a license instead of a product, I'm more concerned about overzealous copyright claims and the obliteration of the constitutional guarantee of Fair Use.
I'm just in from Atlanta where Doug was singing in a concert. I didn't go. I sat in a Starbucks and read the Times; the gritty newsprint version. You can't get that here in Milledgeville. It's a treat; a highlight as always, Frank Rich's column. Go read it! The man's on a roll. Headlined "The Plot Against Sex in America," here's a snippet:
In the case of [the film] "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalition has called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by Fox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in the Murdoch empire, Fox News.) But such organizations don't really care about "Kinsey" - an art-house picture that, however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by a relatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The film is just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in doubt: The Washington Post reports that this year some 40 states are dealing with challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools.) ...a new Congressional report, spearheaded by the California Democrat Henry Waxman, shows that various fictions of junk science (AIDS is spread by tears and sweat, for instance) have turned up as dogma in abstinence-only sex education programs into which American taxpayers have sunk some $900 million in five years. Right now this is the only kind of sex education that our government supports, even though science says that abstinence-only programs don't work - or may be counterproductive. A recent Columbia University study found that teens who make "virginity pledges" to delay sex until marriage still have premarital sex at a high rate (88 percent) rivaling those that don't, but are less likely to use contraception once they do. It's California, a huge blue state that refuses to accept federal funding for abstinence-only curriculums, that has a 40 percent falloff in teenage pregnancy over the past decade, second only to Alaska.
Plenty of questions about Kerik; Josh Marshall was my jumping off point.
A bumper sticker on a red pickup truck with an American flag decal in the window pulling into the parking lot of Huddle House:
I LOVE MY COUNTRY BUT I FEAR MY GOVERNMENT
This even with a Bush victory...
A friend pointed me to this article about gay and lesbian couples seeking divorce in Massachusetts, a scant seven months after obtaining the right to legally marry there. You know the Right is going to have a field day with this. My answer is, what did you expect? The whole darned society works against stable gay relationships so I'd be surprised if this wasn't the result. Plenty of evidence of this was on display in the recent passage of all those anti-gay-marriage amendments and the attendant news coverage.
I agree with those who believe the marriage fight is central to gay and lesbian acceptance, but I've always said that even once we get the right to marry we have a long way to go. I went to a friend's wedding last year in Atlanta. It was a lavish affair with friends flown in from around the country, extended families on both sides, and presided over by a priest and a rabbi. Everyone was there to affirm and support that couple's commitment. Unfortunately, even if the laws are changed nationwide I won't have that. It will take a lot of time and education and work towards broad understanding and acceptance before that is available to me. I and most of my friends have struggled with relationships, at least in part, as a result.
My first reaction to Bernard Kerik's withdrawal from consideration for Homeland Security Secretary is disappointment. He wasn't my favorite New York City Police Commissioner, but he was good. I pretty much liked everyone who held that job through the 80s and 90s. That's hard to say given some of the horrible things that went down, most memorably Abner Louima among way too many others. But in a police force the size of New York's there are bound to be bad apples. New York has always worked hard to remove them.
I lived in the city from 1975 through 2003. When I arrived crime was rampant and the city bankrupt. By the time I left the city had become one of the safest in the world. Before moving down here I compared New York and Milledgeville crime rates and New York did remarkably well. Compare New York to Atlanta and you really see the difference (click here to pick your city). What's most significant is that the New York City Police didn't just bring down crime; they did it while at the same time protecting the rights of its citizens, even if living there you don't always have that perspective.
It's illustrative to look at the difference during the political conventions last summer between Boston locking up demonstrators in a pen under an interstate, and New York closing down Eighth Avenue for a huge march. I've been in some of those marches, and I'm impressed with how they're handled. Consider the Seattle Police Department and the WTO in 1999; they were in way over their head. I see the difference in almost every city I visit or read about. Any city would be well served to have the kind of police force New York has. Homeland Security would have been in good hands with Bernard Kerik.
Peter Beinart's article An Argument for a New Liberalism, A Fighting Faith in The New Republic has been all over the blogosphere. I read lots of commentary before finally sitting down with the article in an Athens, GA coffee shop this past Sunday. Beinart argues that until the Democratic Party reigns in its liberal base and takes the Jihadist threat seriously, they're going to lose. He sees the militant Islamic threat as clear and equivalent to the totalitarian threat in World War II and the communist threat in the Cold War. Basically, I do too. But I've always had a paranoid world view (duck and cover!) and I can see why others don't. Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly blogger (I'm a long time subscriber to the print magazine and a big fan of the blog) is a case in point. He wrote a must read response to the Beinart article that, after an eye openening review of historical comparisons, concludes:
I think the majority of liberals could probably be persuaded to take a harder line on the war on terror — although it's worth emphasizing that the liberal response is always going to be different from the conservative one, just as containment was a different response to the Cold War than outright war. But first someone has to make a compelling case that the danger is truly overwhelming. So far, no one on the left has really done that.
Today Jonah Goldberg jumped in to back Beinart. (I watch Fox News sometimes too, it's good to hear what the other side has to say.) His "compelling case" for an overwhelming danger is that everybody says it's so and isn't it obvious? As I said, I'm inclined to agree that the threat is as they say. What I don't get is why they don't respect the need to persuade us. Especially after Iraq, where so many of the arguments were wrong (on WMD, on welcoming throngs, on quick victory, on how many troops, the list goes on). For all the talk of spreading democracy around the world, they have very little patience with the inherent messiness of democracy; the need to convince people and convince them again. After all, it's World War IV they're talking about.
In a story on iPods in the classroom, Georgia College (my department!) was mentioned in the Circuits section of The New York Times today:
While Apple says Brearley's mandatory-iPod program is the first it has heard of at the secondary-school level, there have been comparable efforts at universities. This fall Duke issued an iPod to each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen and has tried to incorporate the device into several courses, including music, language and engineering. Last year, Georgia College & State University began lending the devices to students for use in several humanities courses.
A moment in the spotlight. My colleague and yoga buddy Rob Viau is a mover behind the iPod program here. He says there's a possibility of something larger in the future.
I've been looking all day for a transcript (found it, see the extended entry) from last night's Nightline, which focused on the 2.6 ton Ten Commandments monument that Judge Roy Moore had installed in a Mississippi courtroom. You will likely recall that it was ordered removed. Turns out that it's now on tour. 
A guy from American Veterans in Domestic Defense (!) got himself a flatbed truck and a driver and is hauling the thing all over the south. The website for the tour, standingforgod.org, has been down since this morning. I went there looking to see if the monument would be coming to my town. People here sure would like it if it did.
I wanted the transcripts so I could quote directly from those interviewed for the show. I wanted to share with you the kind of sentiment I hear expressed in my "Middle Georgia" community. Coming from New York as I do, you'll understand it's not the worldview I'm used to hearing. But here getting the Ten Commandments hung in court houses is the biggest issue since the Georgia Heritage Coalition (why am I surprised they're still in business?) took up the fight to retain the Confederate battle flag as part of the Georgia State Flag. For $4.50 you can get a Ten Commandments sign from Ten Commandments America for your lawn. Many here have them. How many? In New York during the Republican Convention you couldn't walk the street without seeing a "Say no to the Bush agenda" banner (mine was a birthday gift from Howard & Alex). 
I'd say it's proportionally equivalent. The Ten Commandments signs are to here, as the "Say no to Bush" banners are to there.
Now that doesn't make me real comfortable. The Ten Commandments crowd tends to believe I'm going to hell. But the thing is, I believe we've got to live together, and no matter where we live we'll have people we don't agree with. My experience here has been that everyone is nice as can be to me. Doug plays organ in half the churches in town. All the church folk seem to like us. I've had some try to save me, sway me to their ways. Their religion tells tham that's the godly, the christian thing to do. I'm not sure what the best thing for me to do is. For the moment, I think finding common ground is a good thing. I only wish that's the way they felt.
So long as I'm doing out of date news, this is an oldie but goodie that deserves to be remembered. When I saw it, before I had finished building my blog, I immediately raised my TiVo rating for Chris Matthew's to three thumbs up! He interviewed Jerry Falwell on Hardball on Thursday, December 2nd. Wonkette quotes:
MATTHEWS: How old were you when you chose to be heterosexual? FALWELL: Oh, I don't remember that. MATTHEWS: Well, you must, because you say it's a big decision. FALWELL: Well, I started dating when I was about 13. MATTHEWS: And you had to decide between boys and girls. And you chose girls. FALWELL: I never had to decide. I never thought about it.
She's got the full exchange here with lots more and links to the show transcript.
The Washington Monthly pointed me to this. It turns out that 99.8% of the indecency claims made to the FCC in 2003 came from one group, the Parents Television Council. They're "non-partisan" but the fact that Bill Bennett is on their board should tell us something. From the Media Week story:
The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, [FCC chairman Michael] Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.� What Powell did not reveal—apparently because he was unaware—was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group.
UPDATE: I'm told that in the blogosphere this is way old news. And living in Milledgeville is no excuse. I've been too busy working on making the site work! As I get better, I'll be more timely.
As best I can remember it was the summer of 1979 that I worked at The Monster in Cherry Grove on Fire Island. I was a waiter. Warren Gluck was the DJ and would let me work the dance floor lights. Sherwood ("I'm Sherwood and I sure-would!") tended bar. My best friend at the time, my first friend in New York City, Michael Stulberg, took me out there and showed me the ropes. We worked together at The Copacabana. When it burned (mysteriously, of course) I got the job at The Monster. Michael went to The Pines and worked at The Pavillion. Calvin Klein's houseboy was a childhood friend, so we spent time in his Pines beachfront home; never got around to a dip in his black swimming pool that was lit at night with red lights.
The summer before we had been to the closing party of The Sandpiper, the small restaurant/disco on the bay in The Pines. We had many great times there, so mourned its passing. But when the Pavillion opened The Sandpiper was quickly forgotten. It seemed to me that The Pavillion would change forever the dynamic between The Pines and The Grove. Prior to The Pavillion the biggest dance venue on the island was The Ice Palace in Cherry Grove. On Saturday night everyone came. I remember Cher hanging out on the deck as the sun came up after a long night of dancing. Now The Pavillion was the venue and there was little reason for Pines people to come visit the funkier Grove.
From the summer of '77 through the summer of '82 I had the time of my life on Fire Island. There was no paradise more beautiful. But when we left on the ferry that last summer (I no longer went out there to work, but I helped Michael move in and out), somehow I knew that time was over. In December Michael died of the newly named AIDS. Nearly everyone I knew then would contract the disease. Fire Island wasn't fun anymore. Provincetown became my summer resort destination of choice.
Last month my boss, the legendary owner of The Monster, Joe Scialo died. Sam, a friend from then who shares the memories, sent me an email telling me last night. Thanks Sam.
It's the first night of Hanukah. Grace Jones is singing "Love is a Drug" through TiVo in the living room via iTunes on the vintage iMac. Doug's decorating the tree. I'm in the office on the PC playing with my blog. Gotta work on the insert-a-picture function. And I still can't get a link back to the main page from the category page.
Happy Hanukah everyone.
Better pictures to come in the future. Or click here for my photo album (it hasn't been updated since summer).
What do you think about Outing? I think I'm for it. Michael Rogers definitely is. Click here for his latest action -- really complete, thorough work. And click here for his blog. I visit regularly.
You could be wondering, I did, why blog? For me, I set up my website so that I could have a way of keeping in touch with, and being found by, old friends and colleagues. I spent my entire adult life in New York; for 25 years I was the only Windish in the Manhattan phone book (now there are none). If someone, anyone, wanted to find me, all they had to do was look. Everyone knew I was and would always be a New Yorker. But look, here I am in Milledgeville, GA. Won't they be surprised! So one reason I've staked my claim to the Internet space is to be found.
The blog is an extension of that and more: it's a way to stay intellectually engaged both with my far away friends and with the world of issues and ideas. In New York I felt very engaged; I was constantly involved in rigorous conversations on the issues of the day. Even at work we had a tradition of lunches together during which we'd debate issues, sometimes heatedly. I looked forward to a monthly Internet industry salon that I contributed to through the peak of the Internet bubble.
Here I'm just as engaged, but I rarely have the conversations I once thrived on. I still subscribe to my magazines, watch the news programs, and read the blogs that get me all fired up. I'm as fired up as ever; with nowhere to let off steam. So maybe my blog will help with that. Maybe it will open up whole new worlds. Maybe a new day's dawning. Now that's a swell thought.
I've worked in and around technology for all of my professional career, but only recently have I been so hands on. Last spring I was asked to build a website for a friend in New York. Shortly thereafter I decided to build my own. To build it I started with Front Page but moved quickly to Dreamweaver, and got some help from students and friends. My web hosting service is icdSoft. Love them! They have great rates, great features and great customer service. I found them through a google search, checked out their ratings, and couldn't be happier.
A couple weeks ago I started building my blog. Little did I know what I was getting into. I thought I wanted a simple design, one page with entries, the ability to sort by date or topic. What's so tough about that??? I started with a Dreamweaver tutorial that was way too complicated and much more than I wanted. But I figured that I could adapt it once I built it. After a few days I learned quite a bit but threw in the towel and moved on. Bblog was next. It's a nice free full featured php based blog package. I got it installed, learned a whole lot more, got it working, then found that modifying the templates to make it look the way I wanted was a bigger challenge than I was up for at that moment. Next up, Movable Type. I picked it because it had a template that I liked. Later I found that the small adaptation I wanted to make would lead to days of trial and error. More learning.
Today it's working (last night, it wasn't). And I LOVE THEM! The Movable Type people. It's free if you're just doing a small blog. I like ti's features. (Search my blog!) The support forums are good. Right now my trackback isn't working, I want a link to the main page from the topic page and I want to add some links to the sidebar. But for the moment, I've had enough so this will just have to do! Anyway, after all these weeks, it's finally time to author entries...
I just finished the 20/20 on Matthew Shepard. It had been sitting on my TiVo for nearly 2 weeks as I avoided it. I thought I had to watch it in order to form an opinion, but I knew I'd be annoyed by it, as much for the formulaic network garbage as for the particular content of this episode. It lived up to and exceeded expectations. I think the network did what networks do, sensationalize and pander to the mood of the moment to get a big audience. I just hate that America watches it!
So, as to content, click here to see what Judy Shepherd has to say, and here for GLAAD's take on the questions that should have been asked. Both are worth a read. Andrew Sullivan should have been identified as a conservative instead of just a "prominent gay advocate." He is a prominent gay advocate, but far from the generic brand. The show used innuendo and interviews of self-confessed liars and killers to try to say that it wasn't a hate crime; I still belive it was, the moral values crowd never did. This certainly plays to them. What I saw in Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were a couple of lying thugs covering their butts.
My biggest reaction though is to note that these days homophobes are getting away with denying that they have any antipathy to gay people at all. Aaron McKinney saying that he had gay friends. Yeah right. Why didn't 20/20 interview one? His definition of "friend" is he's seen one around and not beat him up! It's like racists saying they have black friends because they like the black woman who waits on them at Waffle House. That's so broad a definition of friend as to be meaningless.
Now we have Jerry Falwell and James Dobson saying that they have no animosity towards gay people. At first I thought this a good thing: they've been forced by the success of the lesbian and gay civil rights movement to hide their homophobia. But now it worries me. What they're really doing is cloaking their homo hatred in tolerance and compassion. Others are taking their lead. Many of them voted for the anti-gay marriage amendments, comfortable that they're still tolerant and compassionate. For all the complaints about political correctness, it seems to me the Right has learned to twist it so that it works well as a tool to preserve and protect their intolerance and bigotry.
UPDATE -- Frank Rich had a great colmn in the New York Times on Sunday commenting on the pandering to the right that network television news is doing these days. The 20/20 Matthew Shepard piece was a case in point. blogACTIVE applauds him for it.
I've been working on this blog for a couple weeks. I couldn't wait to get the programming side done so I could get to my first entry. Then blam-o! I spent 40 minutes typing a nothing entry (since deleted) about listening to Christian radio. I'll have to get the hang of this; but it looks like it'll take some time...
