aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Zach in the Times
Zach’s story is in the New York Times today.
The story is a good one. It reviews the history of Love In Action and includes this from the Rev. John J. Smid, the executive director of Love in Action:
For Mr. Smid and his supporters, offering Love in Action to teenagers is vital to combat what they see as a growing tolerance of homosexuality among young people. “We just really believe that the resounding message for teenagers in our culture is, practice whatever you want, have sex however, whenever and with whoever you want,” he said. “I very deeply believe that is harmful. I think exploring sexuality can lay a teenager up for numerous lifelong issues.”
Yes, there is growing tolerance of gay and lesbian people, because we have learned and discredited the out-dated notion that to be lesbian or gay is to be diseased. (Andrew Sullivan gets it right when he notes the similarity of this rhetoric to “the most vicious anti-Semites against Jews.")
Can’t anyone see the irony of how they define a homosexual inclination as having sex “however, whenever and with whoever,” even as they stand in the way of same-sex marriage? It’s only the biggest lesbian and gay civil right movement struggle ever: achieving legal recognition and support for our committed relationships.
Stopping same-sex marriage is apparently even higher on their agenda than abortion. Back in February Andrew asked, why no anti-abortion constitutional amendment?
RELATED: Zach’s dad, on the Christian Broadcasting Network:
“We felt very good about Zach coming here because… to let him see for himself the destructive lifestyle, what he has to face in the future, and to give him some options that society doesn’t give him today,” Stark told CBN. “Knowing that your son… statistics say that by the age of 30 he could either have AIDS or be dead.”
Another reason we don’t like Virginia
They burn churches and this is what they call a dog walk! Note, no fence between the busy highway and the narrow strip of grass. This place is not fit for man nor beast!
Meanwhile, I-95 is closed so our preferred I-81 is packed. If only we had automated driving.
Doug says, “Virginia’s so beautiful, it’s such a shame...”
London lessons
On the Sunday chat shows last weekend, I heard a lot of things from the pundits I just don’t buy about the London bombing.
Most significantly, we seem to believe that we have hobbled Al Qaeda’s ability to pull off large scale attacks.
Hello? Doesn’t anyone remember how long it was between World Trade Center attacks?
We’ve also concluded that London’s openness is at fault and our Patriot Act keeps us from suffering the same fate.
I don’t think so.
Yesterday on This American Life, we heard the story of The Arms Trader:
The U.S. government spent two years on a sting operation, trapping an Indian man named Hemant Lakhani whom they suspected of being an illegal arms dealer. It’s one of the few cases that has gone to trial in the War on Terror, and one the Justice Department has pointed to as one of their big successes. In the end, they got Lakhani, red-handed, delivering a missile to a terrorist in New Jersey. The only problem was, nothing in the sting was what it appeared to be. Including the missile.
In the end we learn that they got Lakhani. But what Lakhani did was buy a fake missile from a fake arms dealer for a fake terrorist.
My problem is this: The guy may have been a bad guy who did a bad thing. But this fake deal soaked up a lot of time, money and manpower. All of which might have been better spent on the real terrorist threat.
Friday, July 15, 2005
On the road again
We’re heading for Provincetown, MA, summer home of Andrew Sullivan. With 2 video cameras, a digital still and a couple iPods (for “research"). If I spot him I’ll snap a photo and post it. Hopefully, I’ll get some better video than that.
Driving and taking our sun-worshipper dogs (they’re real “man magnets"), we’re visiting friends and family along the way. We arrive Sunday. So posting will be necessarily sparse.
I hope you will take the time maybe to visit some of my favorites, or my struggles with videoblogging, or just snoop around. But please do keep visiting. Ego compels me to want to hang on to my Marauding Marsupial ranking, even as I consider blogging more hobby than sport.
Hillary for President Supreme Court
In other Hillary news, the cover of the July/August issue of The Washington Monthly is a debate between Carl Cannon (pro) and Amy Sullivan (con) on Hillary’s presidential chances in 2008.
In a Kevin Drum comment on the debate focusing on Hillary’s improved media persona ("one thing that’s struck me during the past few years is that she’s gotten way better at dealing with the press") he notes that Carl and Amy agree on many points:
They agree that Hillary’s poll numbers are pretty decent. They agree that she can win the Democratic nomination but it’s the general election that will give her trouble. They agree that the big unknown is whether she can appeal to married white women. And they agree that there’s a big chunk of the electorate that won’t vote for her no matter what.
DafyDD doesn’t agree. Joe Gandelman pointed to Daffy’s Captain’s Quarters take on why Hillary Will Never Be The Presidential Nominee.
Daffy thinks Hillary’s “a mediocre hack who grandstanded [her] way through the decades, lurching from one outrageous statement to another, and never actually running anything.” He believes her victory in New York, “a state she had never lived in her life,” was “procurred for her by her hubby’s election team.”
I haven’t seen evidence that upstate New Yorkers are feeling bamboozled. More, I think, Amy gets it right:
One of the unexpected benefits of being demonized and attacked by conservatives for more than a decade turns out to be that voters are surprised and relieved when she doesn’t fly into town on a broomstick… many voters-weaned on a diet of conservative talking points during the 1990s-expected Clinton to be a liberal of the bluest sort, to the left of Ted Kennedy and unable to understand their concerns. What they found was that her positions on welfare, crime, and foreign policy, among other issues, were far more centrist than liberal. In addition, while most professional political observers dismissed her “Listening Tour” as a stunt, Clinton actually used it to query New Yorkers about their problems and obsessively study up on local issues.
But Daffy’s swipes at Hillary are not the point. What Daffy says that makes much sense is, “Bluntly put, senators are simply not elected president” becuase “A senator is...not single-handedly responsible for “governing” any large governmental organization” and “a senator is a deal-maker… that is, a compromiser. They do not decide, they debate; they do not govern, they negotiate, they cut deals, they sacrifice one principle for another.”
I agree.
Which brings me to Norman Orenstien’s argument for more politicians on the Supreme Court. I think it’s a good one. (James Joyner is considerably more ambivalent).
So how about this? Hillary Clinton for the Supreme Court!
I bet the Captain’s Quarters crowd would consider that idea, well, Daffy.
Hillary’s mythical move to the center
Media Matters in May, on the Clintons’ liberal branding. It’s from the conservatives:
The idea that both Bill and Hillary Clinton are extreme liberals has been a conservative staple since the early 1990s. Newt Gingrich even referred to the Clintons as “counter-culture McGoverniks.” This notion persisted despite Bill Clinton’s leadership of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and his relatively conservative positions on issues including welfare reform, the death penalty, missile defense, and the North American Free Trade Agreement—positions that Hillary Clinton shares. So where does the idea come from? Those most likely to describe Bill Clinton as extremely liberal are extreme conservatives; National Election Studies data show strong conservatives rating Clinton more liberal than any other Democratic presidential candidate, including Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, George McGovern and Hubert H. Humphrey. This feeling is probably more a translation of generalized antipathy into an ideological assessment than a realistic conclusion based on issues. Put simply, conservatives say they don’t like the Clintons because they believe they are too liberal, but in reality, they just don’t like the Clintons.
I revisited Media Matters after reading the latest evolution of Hillary piece, this one in the NYTimes:
As she gears up her re-election campaign for the United States Senate, Hillary Rodham Clinton is presenting a side of herself that might have given some of her supporters great pause just a few years ago. Nothing captures this new face of Hillary Clinton better than the Web site her campaign started this week: It portrays her robust stand on national defense and her desire to reduce the number of abortions, among other positions.
I visited the website and didn’t note the same emphasis the Times found. The article’s examination of her positions on abortion, immigration, health care and national security didn’t expose a giant shift. Rather, I think they show a politically savvy maturing that I find attractive in an elected official.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
African jailed for running as woman
My friend John sent me this:
HARARE, Zimbabwe (Reuters)—A Zimbabwean court has jailed a man masquerading as a female athlete, court officials said on Thursday.
Samukeliso Sithole—a triple jumper and runner who competed as a woman at several international sports events—was convicted on charges of impersonation and offending the dignity of a woman athlete who undressed in his presence, unaware he was a man.
I can only wonder what the real story is here:
Sithole told the court at his first appearance that he had both female and male organs and that he lived as a woman after consulting a traditional healer. A medical examination showed that he was a man.
Guilty
Rove’s behavior put an end to any doubts I had.
TPM suggests we “set aside a few minutes to read this new piece by Sid Blumenthal, which sets out the broad horizon of where the Rove/Plame story is at press, while knocking down much of the standing disinformation.”
I did. You should too.
Grrr
My video‘s been rejected!
The cryptic message refers me to the policy guidelines that by now I know by heart:
6. What are the technical requirements for my video to be included in Google Video?
• The video must be in a format we accept; see question 5 above
• The video must contain recognizable video content (video container files that do not contain video will not be accepted)
• The frame rate should be above 12 frames per second
• The video metadata must be accurate and relevant to the content you upload (no spam)
Ok. It has to be 5. Even though I’ve uploaded this stuff a dozen times in varying formats and settings trying to meet their file format spec:
5. What file formats do you accept?
Google accepts video in a wide range of popular formats. The fastest way to get your videos into Google Video is to submit each file in MPEG4 format with MP3 audio or MPEG2 with MP3.
While we also support other digital formats such as QuickTime, Windows Media, and RealVideo, it’s important to note that submitting your files in these formats may significantly delay us from using them on Google Video. In some cases, we may not be able to add your video at all.
Here are our preferred video specs:
• NTSC (4:3) size and framerate, deinterlaced
• Video Codec: MPEG2 or MPEG4 (MPEG4 preferred)
• Video Bitrate: at least 260Kbps (750kbps preferred)
• Audio Codec: MP3 vbr
• Audio Bitrate: at least 70Kbps (128 Kbps preferred)
I know they’re in beta but a little more spcificity would be helpful. The video they rejected met that “preferred” spec and there’s no way for me to find out more on why it was rejected.
Is it too much to ask for a “How to” that suggests settings for the major popular video editing packages, say iMovie, FinalCut, Avid and Adobe Premier? Or even an advanced settings screen?
I’ve resaved with new output settings and uploaded again. And I’m open to advice if you have some to offer.
Damned if you do…
James Joyner notes that PBS will have six Monty Python specials next spring. Then observes:
...one can not help but wonder why we need taxpayer subsidies for this sort of thing. Python (admittedly shown originally on the British Government-owned BBC) has been a great commercial success for thirty years now. People are paying $600 apiece for tickets to see “Spamalot” on Broadway. Why could a commercial or cable network not produce this show?
Get with the program James. I expect broad Republican support for PBS now that they’ve tackled the nasty liberal bias.
And my position will be that I don’t like the way the game is played, public braodcasting has never been efffectively public anyway, so it’s time to let go and change the media structure.
Goodbye network TV; hello we TV!
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Hard drive failures
Someone explain this to me. How can this be true:
“Eventually, every hard drive will fail,” some even within months, said Todd Johnson, vice president for operations at OnTrack Data Recovery (www.ontrack.com), a firm specializing in recovering digital files… [DriveSavers’ co-founder Scott] Gaidano says that hard drives are so unreliable that they “should not exist today.”
If this is true:
But even if you do wipe your disk successfully-and overwrite each of your deleted files-traces of the original data remain. Writing to a magnetic disk is not as precise as one might think; when you overwrite a file, the new version doesn’t completely cover up the old. The leftover data can be read out with certain imaging techniques, like magnetic-force microscopy and magnetic-force scanning tunneling microscopy. Computer forensics experts say it’s possible to recover data beneath dozens of layers of overwriting, and privacy fanatics talk about wiping their disks up to 35 times over to be absolutely safe.
Make money giving away your books
Cory Doctorow gives away his books. I’ve heard him explain why before. This time, I’m transcribing it. From his talk with Dave Slusher in the IT Conversations series Voices in Your Head. This passage follows his excellent description of the Creative Commons Developing Nations Deed ("a no-brainer and it’s a good idea"):
[My transcription beginning @ 51:15] The important thing for me isn’t whether or not I lose some sales. The important thing for me is whether I gain more sales than I’ve lost… The thing that’s important to me isn’t to get 100% of a very small pie, it’s to make sure that the piece of pie that I get is as large as possible.
And so I think that by giving books away I make a much larger pie. I gave away half a million copies of my first novel through my website and God knows how many more copies have been given away through other people’s websites. It’s just gone into its fifth printing!…
You can think about this as dramatically lowering my cost of customer acquisition while simultaneously lowering my per customer revenue. So I was able to acquire 500,000 customers for free, but most of them never bought the book, so the other ones are paying for the free ride…
I think that’s pretty typical of any kind of entertainment economics, that you have, you know, with music. How many people listen to a song on the radio without buying the CD?
The emphasis is mine.
Book is…
Cory Doctorow talking with Dave Slusher from the IT Conversations series Voices in Your Head:
[My transcription beginning @ 43:20] Book is what you do when you’re reading. Book is not a literary form, because obviously we have literary forms that we’ve called books that weren’t published in book form starting with the Bible… That book was a scroll. You know, it wasn’t in book form at all. And then we have books like Charles Dickens books which were in fact published in newspapers as serials.
So clearly it’s not a literary form and it’s not a physical object, it’s a practice. It’s the thing that you do when you are reading things that are book-like… Book is not a thing, it’s a verb, it’s not a noun. So I think that when you consider that more people read more words off of more screens every day, and fewer people read fewer words off of fewer pages every day, then we have to conclude that what people are doing with screens is book.
Santorum on Boston liberals
When I posted it, I worried that the quote was so old that it wasn’t legitimate. But it turns out that, when asked about it yesterday, Santorum stands squarely behind it:
WASHINGTON—Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, refused yesterday to back off on his earlier statements connecting Boston’s ‘’liberalism” with the Roman Catholic Church pedophile scandal, saying that the city’s ‘’sexual license” and ‘’sexual freedom” nurtured an environment where sexual abuse would occur.
“The basic liberal attitude in that area . . . has an impact on people’s behavior,” Santorum said in an interview yesterday at the Capitol.
“If you have a world view that I’m describing [about Boston] . . . that affirms alternative views of sexuality, that can lead to a lot of people taking it the wrong way,” Santorum said.
The more he and his ilk are emboldened, the more they’ll say what they really think. And what they really think is out of step with the majority view of the American public.
I believe that it’s the closet that’s dangerous. That out proud gay people pose no threat, but shame-filled, repressed people with secrets are more apt to do shameful things they’ll later regret. And dare I say it? Out proud gay people are less likely to become Catholic priests; and those out proud gay people who do, bound by their vow of celibacy, are not likely to molest children.
More of what they really think:
Santorum has startled Washington in the past. In a 2003 interview with the Associated Press, he linked ‘’man on child” and ‘’man on dog” sex with homosexuality, describing them as deviant behaviors that threatened traditional marriage. Earlier this year, he apologized for comparing the Democrats blocking President Bush’s judicial nominees to the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.
Via CapitolBuzz which provides a handy Action Alert link so “you can help hold Rick Santorum accountable.”
Public Access on steroids
“We’re going from being media consumers to media makers. We’re learning how to do that,” said Chuck Olsen, a documentary filmmaker and video blogger in Minnesota. “There’s sort of a whole continuum between (videotaping) grandpa’s birthday and filmmaking.”
Anyone can “create media and have a distribution outlet for it that bypasses television and mainstream media,” Olsen said. “It’s like slightly curated cable-access.”
Public Access is an often unacknowledged and underappreciated forerunner to all that the Internet is becoming.
There’s lots of legal limbo here:
Copyright issues are also popping up as more and more people get into vlogging. Vloggers sometimes use copyright music in their vlogs, but they are unclear about whether the practice falls under the heading of fair use or not. Olsen said there has been a movement to get people to use Creative Commons-licensed music so they don’t have to worry about infringing copyrights.
“The technology to capture what’s around you is becoming so prevalent,” Olsen said. “It’s completely clashing with existing laws. I just think we’re in this weird growing-pains stage where it has to be worked out.”
The reason I’m excited that Google and Apple are involved is that distribution of content by and for you and me figures in to their business model. So maybe they’ll go to bat for us. Or at least support and encourage Creative Commons licenses.
And although some viewers might find the videos dull as cardboard, Olsen said some vloggers rally ‘round the motto, “Mundane is the new punk rock.”
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
CPB
Last Friday Max Blumenthal took a good hard look at Fred Mann, the “conservative activist with no credentials as an expert on journalism, broadcasting or media issues, who was obscure even within right-wing circles” and who Kenneth Tomlinson, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, hired to secretly monitor four public broadcasting programs in search of liberal bias.
I went back for a second look in light of Tomlinson’s appearance before the Senate appropriations subcommittee yesterday:
“I have brought the issue of political balance - common-sense political balance - to the debate,” said Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the corporation’s chairman, in his first appearance before Congress since recent disclosures that he was under investigation by the corporation’s inspector general for a series of decisions and payments to consultants that he has said were necessary to ensure balance in programming.
I’m always interested to see how successfully those who are so adamantly opposed to the Fairness Doctrine have co-opted and perverted the term “balance.” More from the Times on yesterday’s hearing:
The decisions under review include the hiring of a former official of a conservative journalism training organization to monitor several programs, notably “Now” with Bill Moyers; payments of $15,000 to two Republican lobbyists last year to help defeat a proposal to have more broadcasters on the corporation’s board; and the use of a White House official to help create a new office of ombudsman at the corporation to monitor balance in programs.
Tomlinson’s ombudsmen, Ken Bode and William Schulz, reviewed and critiqued NPR and PBS news segments. The Washington Post reports they found no bias:
Instead, Bode and Schulz have been positively glowing in their assessments of the journalism heard on NPR and seen on news shows distributed by PBS. So glowing, in fact, that Schulz and Bode’s reports, which are posted on CPB’s Web site could easily be excerpted in the shorthand style of a movie ad quoting favorable reviews.
Overall, I’m still not optimistic. In the end we have a 30 minute Now without Bill Moyers and “balanced” by a 60 minute Wall Street Journal Editorial Report AND Tucker Carlson. So it’s not surprising to hear:
Both Tomlinson and the CPB’s new president, former Republican National Committee co-chairwoman Patricia Harrison, advocated that the Senate restore funding cuts made by the House in its budget bill. They got a vote of support from Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who said at the hearing that he would work for full funding.
It looks to me like we’ve lost the battle and lost the war.
Public Domain as “unfair competition”
The BBC is being attacked by UK record companies for giving away public domain recordings of Beethoven. According to the record companies, such offers are “unfair competition.”
Ludicrous Permission Culture
We’ve been talking here for some time about using your fair-use rights so that you don’t lose them (Fair Use It or Lose It). But what happens if you do what the copyright maximalists appear to encourage and ask permission for every use of copyrighted material—even the most defensible private home use?
She points to JD Lasica’s experiences asking movie studios for permission to include small clips of movies in a home video he’s making with his 5-year-old:
As I wrote in Darknet, four of the studios refused outright, two refused to respond, and the seventh wobbled (see below).
This is the quandary millions of us face today: The Hollywood studios demand that we ask for permission to borrow from their works - and then they deny our requests as a matter of course.
He details his experiences: Universal, “$900 for each 15 seconds.” Warner Bros., “does not wish to license film clips.” 20th Century Fox, “does not approve the use of any.” Columbia TriStar, “We do have a problem with that.” MGM & Paramount both declined to answer.
Then there’s Disney:
Due to the growing number of requests that we are receiving from individuals, school groups, churches, corporations and other organizations that wish to use clips from our productions as part of their video projects and other similar uses, we have had to establish a general policy of non-cooperation with requests of this nature. Unfortunately, we simply do not have the staff necessary to oversee and review all of the details of each specific request that we receive in order to determine whether the request uses fall within acceptable guidelines or whether talent, music or film clip re-use payments to those featured in the footage and other legal clearances would be necessary to obtain before permission for requests of this nature can be granted.
Concludes Donna, “It’s hard to imagine a better argument for the necessity of organizations like Creative Commons.”
Via Ernest:
There should be no permission necessary for the creation of works in which there is no public distribution. Life would be much simpler and just.
The power of one teen’s blog
From Terrance Heath’s opinion column in Bay Windows on the impact of Zach’s blog:
That’s the real story here: how one teenager, and lots of bloggers, used the Internet to shine a light into a dark corner that most people had never looked into before. Not long ago, it would have been a non-story. A teenager without a blog would have been packed off to [Love In Action/Refuge] LIA/R, having probably told only a few friends, and the story wouldn’t have spread much further than that. But this teenager lives in an age where setting up a blog is so easy that it can be done in a few minutes, and it’s free. He used it to amplify his voice. It was heard and echoed by thousands of others, until someone somewhere had to do something.
[...]
Ultimately, the story of one scared, lonely teenager touched people and moved them to make a difference. But Zach’s story isn’t over yet. We can only wait and see if we’ll hear from him after he emerges from the Refuge program, and if he’ll emerge with his will and his sense of self - both very evident on his blog - as intact as they were before. It’s possible that he won’t be the same as before, and never will be, but because he spoke out things will never be the same for programs like LIA/R, and that means a bit more hope for the next gay teen who finds himself or herself in the same position as Zach.
Via Terrance’s blog, The Republic of T, which has much more on Zach’s story.
Burned church
Doug says, “More and more Virginia is looking extremely uninviting:”
MIDDLEBROOK, Va. - A small fire and anti-gay graffiti were found Saturday at a church belonging to the United Church of Christ, a denomination that endorsed same-sex marriage last week.
The exterior of St. John’s Reformed United Church of Christ also included a message that United Church of Christ members were sinners.
Monday, July 11, 2005
Frankenpine
From an editorial in the Times today:
The Adirondack Park Agency, a powerful group charged with protecting New York’s six million-acre state park, decided last week that a cellphone tower could be constructed near Lake George. The tower, a 104-foot fake pine tree, will be “substantially invisible,” the agency’s statement promised. If this tower looks like others in the cellphone tree arboretum, one suspects it will be about as substantially invisible as a smiley face tucked into one of the famous Georgia O’Keeffe paintings of the very landscape in question.
Across the country these days, there is an expanding battle between those who want the wilderness to stay as wild as possible and those who want cellphones to work even when they’re camping. At present, the technology has not made it possible to communicate from deep in the forests or out in the desert without also having a 100- to 200-foot tower somewhere nearby. So, some telephone companies have been offering these electric trees and plants that are supposed to look more natural. There is a cellphone magnolia, a cactus that looks as if it could poke a hole in the moon and now the mock white pine at Lake George, or, as opponents have aptly named it, the Frankenpine.
For years I’ve longed for a Michael Graves cellphone tower. In this instance, I bet a Frank Lloyd Wright tower could work.
Isn’t this one of the great design challenges of our era? Let’s enlist some of our great architects.
The real reason for Apple’s switch to Intel
It’s the iPod.
That according to Jon “Hannibal” Stokes at Ars Technica, who’s guessing we may see a video iPod as early as Christmas.
After a discussion of “Apple’s mercurial and high-handed relationship with its chip suppliers” that leaves IBM looking classy, he spills the “insider information from unnamed sources that I can confirm are in a position to know the score:”
For the real reason behind the switch, you have to look to the fact that it’s the iPod and iTMS-not the Mac-that are now driving Apple’s revenues and stock price. As I stated in my previous article on the switch, Apple is more concerned with scoring Intel’s famous volume discounts on the Pentium (with its attendant feature-rich chipsets) and XScale lines than it is about the performance, or even the performance per Watt, of the Mac.
It’s critical to understanding the switch that you not underestimate the importance of Intel’s XScale to Apple’s decision to leave IBM. The current iPods use an ARM chip from Texas Instruments, but we can expect to see Intel inside future versions of the iPod line. So because Apple is going to become an all-Intel shop like Dell, with Intel providing the processors that power both the Mac and the iPod, Apple will get the same kinds of steep volume discounts across its entire product line that keep Dell from even glancing AMD’s way.
If you think XScale is too powerful for the iPod-it’s used in powerful color PDAs-then you’re not taking the device seriously enough as a portable media platform. The XScale is plenty powerful enough to do video playback, and I have reason to believe that Apple is currently working on a video iPod to counter the Sony PSP. (My guess is that we might even see it in time for Christmas.) When the video iPod hits the streets, Apple will have an iPod product that plays each of the media formats (music, pictures, video) represented in its iLife suite.
The cold, hard reality here is that the Mac is Apple’s past and the iPod is Apple’s future, in the same way that the “PC” is the industry’s past and the post-PC gadget is industry’s future. This transition mirrors the industry’s previous transition/expansion from the mainframe to the networked commodity PC-a transition that is still ongoing in some sectors of the market. Of course the PC will stick around, but as the hub of a growing and increasingly profitable constellation of post-PC gadgets. It’s a shame that Steve Jobs can’t be upfront with his user base about that fact, because, frankly, I think the Mac community would understand. The iPod and what it represents-an elegant, intuitively useful, and widely appealing expression of everything that Moore’s Curves promise but so rarely deliver-is the “Macintosh” of the new millennium. There was no need to put on a dog and pony show about how IBM has dropped the performance ball, when what Jobs is really doing is shifting the focus of Apple from a PC-era “performance” paradigm to a post-PC-era “features and functionality” paradigm.
Rove’s way out
I’ve been watching the Rove talk since Saturday’s David Corn post, through yesterday’s release of Isikoff’s Newsweek article, and today’s declarations from bunches of bloggers and writers at Slate and Salon that Rove must go.
I wouldn’t have wanted to be McClellan at the press gaggle this morning (video and links), but I’m withholding comment until this from Hunter at Daily Kos is resolved:
Rove claimed to the FBI that he only found out Wilson’s wife was CIA from reading Novak’s column, and called reporters only after that point.
Novak published on the 14th.
Busted.
Update [2005-7-10 3:45:56 by Hunter]: Oh boy—hang on—this is playing the razor’s edge. Is there is some possibility Rove could have found out “from Novak’s column” on the 11th? Novak’s column was apparently “written” by then, but not actually published until the 14th. Dangerous, dangerous ground. Look for the talking points from hell, once everyone wakes up in the morning.
Update [2005-7-10 4:23:18 by Hunter]: From the Washington Post, Nov 26th 2004:
While Novak’s column did not run until Monday, July 14, it could have been seen by people in the White House or the media as early as Friday, July 11, when the Creators Syndicate distributed it over the Associated Press wire.
Cooper talked to Rove at 11:07am, according to Newsweek. You can bet Fitzgerald has already determined precisely when Novak’s column hit the wires.
So when did the story hit the wire? That’s what I’m still watching for. Rove’s not just an architect, he’s a magician. He’s pulled a rabbit out of his hat before.
House of Labor blog
Nathan Newman‘s writing for a new House of Labor blog:
Joining me at HOUSE OF LABOR is a pretty stellar list of labor writers and activists, including Harold Meyerson, American Prospect editor and Washington Post columnist, Bill Fletcher, President of Transafrica, Jim Grossfeld of the Center for American Progress, Jo-Ann Mort, former director of communications for Unite, Frank Joyce, former UAW director of their publications department, Roberta Lynch, International Vice President of AFSCME, and a number of other folks who will be coming on board.
The goal is to expand the discussion between labor and non-labor progressives on the role and fate of the US labor movement, discuss the policy issues that matter for working families, and more generally discuss the role of the workplace in American politics and society.
I’ve added it to my blogroll and suggest you add it to yours.
RINO sightings
Today’s RINO Sightings is up at ‘Inside Larry’s Head.’
I’m grateful to have a post in it.
