Monday, September 12, 2005

Dead links

I’ve seen bloggers complain about sites that charge for content (and ask for tips themselves) and about Salon’s Site Pass (a mandatory ad model I quite like) but they’re happy to quote and link to Yahoo News stories.

I try not to.

My blog is more than a catalogue of my thoughts and ideas, it’s also an index of my interests. I go back to those things I link to again and again. Yahoo News links go dead too quickly.

Instead I copy a good chunk of their text and paste it right into the search box. From there a list of newspapers with the same story pops up, or sometimes stories with more depth and different takes. It’s those I quote.

There are newspapers that let links go dead sometimes too, but most don’t.

Oh and if registration is required, use the Daily Kos login:

A while back, I asked people to register a “dailykos” account for every free site requiring a registration.

Well, it’s a rare day when I come across a site that doesn’t have one set up. Heck, the last post, taken from the Evansville (IN) Courrier & Press, had an account. So we’re not talking big time papers here. So here’s a reminder to the old times and announcement to the more recent visitors:

If the site asks for a username, it’s:

dailykos

If the site asks for an email login, it’s:

(BTW, don’t email me at , since all email sent to it goes straight into a spam folder unless you’re in my address book.)
There are two possible passwords. Most of the time, it’ll be:

dailykos

However, there’s a minority of sites that require a number in the password, so if “dailykos” doesn’t work, try:

dailykos1

Now, if you come across a site that doesn’t have a dailykos account, please set one up.

Use it you’ll love it!

UPDATE: For those who for one reason or another prefer not to use the Kos login, Basil suggests:

Try using BugMeNot.com. Open a separate browser window (or, if you’re using Firefox, open a new tab) and go to the BugMeNot site. Just enter the URL of the new site that’s asking for registration and, if it has one on file, it will display the information for you. You can use that to access the “registration required” site.

Oh, and if you use Firefox, you might want to try the roachfiend.com BugMeNot extension for Firefox. It works. Once installed, just right-click on the registration form and select “BugMeNot” from the menu.

The Times Strikes—time will tell—Is it Slate or iTunes?

The title is the subject line of an email from a New York friend I stayed with this summer. Then he argued in favor of the Times charging. Today he sent me this Letter from the Editor:

On Monday, Sept. 19, NYTimes.com will launch a new subscription service, TimesSelect, an important step in the development of The New York Times.

Subscribers to TimesSelect will have exclusive online access to many of our most influential columnists in Op-Ed, Business, New York/Region and Sports. In addition to reading the columns, TimesSelect subscribers can also engage with our columnists through video interviews and Web-only postings.

As part of TimesSelect, The Times is also opening up its vast archive of articles reaching back 25 years and eventually back to the paper’s founding in 1851. TimesSelect subscribers can read up to 100 articles from the archive a month. For many years our readers have asked for seamless access to The Times’s historical archive, and we are now making this available as part of TimesSelect.

Subscribers can also benefit from several online services. Readers can save and organize Times articles—and any pages from around the Web—in a personal Times File. News Tracker is a powerful e-mail alert service that keeps readers abreast of the articles they most want. And if you can’t wait until Sunday, Times Preview offers early delivery of articles from the magazine, book review, Arts & Leisure, automobiles, real estate and travel before they are published.

TimesSelect will cost $49.95 a year and will be free for home delivery subscribers to the newspaper. This week, you can sign up early to get uninterrupted access to the columns when TimesSelect launches Sept. 19.

$49.95, less than $5 a month, is certainly a fair price, though I bet I can hit that 100 article a month archive limit from time to time.

We’ve got to pay for quality journalism one way or another. I was one of those who paid to subscribe to Slate, I subscribe now to The New Republic. And I continue to pay for the Washington Monthly, at this point more to support the blog than the print publication.

I also have a .Mac account and that’s way not worth it! But will we bloggers now stop quoting Rich and Dowd and Krugman and let Tierney just drop away instead of loving to rant about him?

Sunstein: I doubt he’s a radical

I haven’t really tuned in to Judge Roberts yet, but generally, I’m not real concerned. I’m on the People for the American Way mailing list and I read Daily Kos and they are concerned.

For now I’m calmed by Cass Sunstein’s comment on Fresh Air last week:

I doubt that he’s a radical. The fact that in his 20s and early 30s he took certain positions doesn’t give us a lot of clues to what he thinks when he’s 50. Probably the fact that he was a cautious and careful judge is more informative than the fact that he was, let’s say, a careful but less than cautious lawyer as a young man. So I feel that we need a good discussion but that there’s no reason to be attacking him or to be frightened of him.

More on the flip.

Read the rest of "Sunstein: I doubt he’s a radical" in the extended entry.

Bureaucracies can

I’m only now watching last weekend’s Chris Matthews Show:

MATTHEWS: Are we any safer now then we were four years ago, David?

DAVID BROOKS: No. The most important lesson of Katrina is this: this was the most anticipated natural disaster in history. There were agencies designed specifically to anticipate this. There were hundreds of conferences. There were bureaucracies, there were plans, everything was in place and still there was a government failure on every single level of government. We just can’t anticipate that bureaucracies can think so far in advance, anticipate contingencies, understand how people will react. It’s just not within the ability of bureaucracies… [everyone starts to jump in, unintelligably]… It’ll be worse! Wait until something happens unanticipated.

SAM DONALDSON: David’s point is right and he speaks for me.

Well if I believed that I’d get out of Dodge!

I was in New York on 9/11 for that unanticipated attack and I personally witnessed bureaucracies perform brilliantly. Yes, there was confusion and chaos and human error and inefficiencies, but believe me, in New York there are bureaucracies and they performed brilliantly.

What, precisely, would Brooks propose? Halliburton?

There’s something sad about the lack of a “can do” spirit in that statement. It was the NASA bureaucracy that put a man on the moon, the armed forces bureaucracy that won world wars, the Tennessee Valley Authority bureaucracy that brought electricity to the south.

Different challenges for different times, I grant you. But we’d damn well better be up for this one, because it ain’t going away any time soon.

I hadn’t heard

I was working. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one:

Q. Can you tell us, have you accepted the resignation of Michael Brown, or have you heard about it?

THE PRESIDENT:  I haven’t—no, I have not talked to Michael Brown—or Mike Chertoff; that’s who I’d talk to.  As you know, I’ve been working.  And when I get on Air Force One, I will call back to Washington.  But I’ve been on the move.

Q. Our understanding is he has resigned, he’s made a statement.  Would that be appropriate --

THE PRESIDENT:  I haven’t talked to Mike Chertoff yet, and that’s what I intend to do when I get on the plane.  You know, I—you probably—maybe you know something I don’t know, but as you know, we’ve been working, and I haven’t had a chance to get on the phone.

Marriage Amendment prospects dim in MA (again)

Today in the WaPo:

BOSTON—A fragile coalition of lawmakers cobbled together to support an anti-gay marriage amendment is falling apart, virtually assuring that same-sex marriage will for now remain legal in Massachusetts, according to an Associated Press poll.

The survey, conducted between Sept. 6-9, found at least 104 lawmakers who plan to vote against the proposed constitutional amendment, which would ban gay marriage but create civil unions.

The amendment, which is scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, needs the support of at least 101 of the state’s 200 lawmakers to get on the 2006 ballot.

[...]

More than a dozen lawmakers who voted for the amendment the first time around said they would change their votes this week, either because they fully support gay marriage or oppose civil unions.

Others said that after more than a year of watching gay couples marry, they see no need to rescind the right. Since Massachusetts’ gay marriages started taking place in May 2004, thousands of same-sex couples have tied the knot.

I remind you again that Nathan Newman says that’s how the system should work:

While the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage, it would only take a majority of the legislature followed by a vote by a majority of the population to reverse that decision.

To the frustration of the proponents of banning gay marriage, the legislature doesn’t appear to have the votes to overturn the court decision.

The legislature probably wouldn’t have had the political will to pass gay marriage on it own, but with the court’s moral argument about what equal protection means, they now have the political courage to uphold it. In some ways, this is a good model for what the judicial role should be in a democratic society and at the federal level. Courts would make clear moral statements of what rights should be under the Constitution, with legislators free to accept or reject that judicial viewpoint.

Compassionate care

The J Train, a Kentucky internist, puts into context stories that doctors injected lethal doses of drugs into their patients so they wouldn’t have to die alone and suffering in New Orleans:

I don’t know how reliable [the story] is, but it’s absolutely plausible (that is, I’d be shocked if this didn’t happen somewhere in all this).

“Triage”, as the word root implies, originally meant separating patients into three groups--those who would likely be OK without medical care, those who are beyond any help, and those who can benefit from medical care.  The idea is to concentrate resources where they can do the most good; it’s no use spending valuable time working on someone with hours left to live no matter what when you can save decades of meaningful life for three or four other people in the same time.  In that case, the right thing to do is to provide comfort for the dying, and in a serious and urgent situation, that might include active euthanasia.

This is not hard to justify once you accept the fact that some patients are going to die in the short term, despite anything anyone can do.  A lot of people don’t accept that; they believe that one should never give up hope, and that death should be fought until the last dying breath.  We doctors often encourage that attitude, because somewhere along the way, we decided that it was healthier for patients and families to plan on a miracle than to prepare themselves for the inevitable.  The hospice movement has helped us get a lot better about that in the last couple of decades, but it’s still pretty common for doctors to tell patients and families not to give up hope when the prognosis is long since clear.

Refreshingly candid, reasonable, rational and caring. The kind of conversation starter I’d like to see more of.