Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Tangled Up in Bleu

Clinton was fine last night but I hardly tuned him in. Jason Jones’ piece on gays in the military, now that’s must see TV:

The best argument for outing

AP:

Once publicly opposed to gay marriage, former New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey now says he spoke out against the idea as a way to keep his homosexuality hidden.

“I did not want to be identified as being gay, and it was the safe place to be,” McGreevey said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press. “I wanted to embrace the antagonist. I wanted to be against it. That’s the absurdity.”

No, the absurdity is the fame, fortune and acceptance he’s getting for his despicable, craven, cowardly and profoundly immoral behavior.

My lengthier argument in favor outing was one of my early blog posts.

Mark Taylor lost my vote today

If you read me at all you know I strongly oppose Georgia’s new sex offender law - see here, here, here, here, here, here and here - widely considered to be one of the strictest in the nation. I object to the law for its emphasis on retributive rather than restorative justice, but even more I object to it because I believe it is counter-productive.

It will drive the real offenders further underground and away from treatment. It will draw resources, money and manpower away from those real offenders. It will give the community a false sense of security. And at the same time a false sense of insecurity.

But apparently here in Georgia gubernatorial candidates believe the way to get elected is to play oneupmanship with child sexual abuse penalties. Yesterday Sonny Perdue said he would ask for a million bucks in the state budget to hire investigators and computer forensic experts to crack down on Internet sex predators.

Today Taylor came out with a new ad. He wants the death penalty for repeat child molesters.

Soapbox

I’m unpersuaded by Mark Cuban’s YouTube prognostications. I expected something more and have been watching for some interesting commentary around it.

None yet.

But I have to say I do read this as refutation:

Microsoft’s much awaited YouTube competitor is all set to get out of the gates, perhaps as early as tomorrow. A Microsoft employee has blogged about the pending release of the video sharing service, code named “Warhol,” that will be renamed as SoapBox. The word of the new service had leaked earlier this month, and caused a lot of chatter.

Kurt Shintaku says that the new service will come with 100 megabytes of storage and will will use Windows Media technology to playback video, instead of more popular Adobe Flash technology. I guess Mac users could play back the videos if they have Flip4Mac. (Rob who works on the SoapBox team says that “Soapbox autodetects your browser + platform and streams WM for IE/Windows users, but Flash for Firefox/Windows and Firefox+Safari on Mac.”)

Well, actually, it crashed my Safari browser. I had to settle for screenshots and the press release. Here’s the early word from CNet.