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July 14, 2005
“I also will not prejudge the investigation based on media reports. We’re in the midst of an ongoing investigation, and I will be more than happy to comment further once the investigation is completed.”
So said our President with Karl Rove seated four feet behind him.
I agree it’d be wrong to judge Rove based solely on media reports. So, W, here’s an idea: Turn around and ask him. [Technorati tags: KarlRove plame]
David Isenberg — with whom I had dinner tonight — a couple of days ago blew apart FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s assertion that the US “leads the world” in broadband growth, as well as a bunch of other Happy Talk. Says Isenberg, we are #12 in broadband per capita. China’s growth rate is substantially greater than ours. Switzerland and the Netherlands have higher per capita acceptance and much faster growth. It would have been nice if the new Chairman had started out with some straight talk…
(PS: David is starting his term as a Berkman Fellow any day now.) [Technorati tags: fcc DavidIsenberg]
July 13, 2005
Rick Santorum continues to affirm that Boston’s “sexual license” and “sexual freedom” (Has he ever been to this city? Puhleease!) created the environment that led to an epidemic of clergymen raping children.
Notice that Boston does not have any more non-clergy-related child abuse cases than anywhere else. So, what Santorum is actually saying is that a sexually permissive environment (again I must laugh) will lead priests astray. Priests in disproportionate numbers.
If Santorum were thinking this through, instead of just trying to raise his ratings with his ultra-conservative constituency, I believe he would come to the conclusion that since priests work in a sexually repressed environment, sexual repression, not permission, fosters a statistically significant tendency toward child rape. I mean, that’s if you want to connect the statistics about child rape with vague characterizations of the “environment,” which is probably a mistake to begin with.
Or, if may put my argument differently, in the words of Barney Frank, Rick Santorum is a jerk. Wait, are the jerks the ones who use the mass rape of children for their political advantage? Yup, they are.
[Technorati tags: RickSantorum]
More seriously, CapitolBuzz reports that a victims’ group has responded to Santorum’s ridiculous theories.
July 12, 2005
Rick Santorum said in 2002 that Boston’s liberal culture is to blame for the fact that an outrageous number of Catholic clergymen have raped children: “While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.” Interesting theory.
And he’s standing by it. When Bryan McGrory in a column in The Boston Globe asked Santorum’s office to elaborate, an aide replied: “It’s an open secret that you have Harvard University and MIT that tend to tilt to the left in terms of academic biases. I think that’s what the senator was speaking to.” Oh yeah, at Harvard and MIT we have people minoring in Child Molestation.
If Santorum believes what he’s saying, he’s irresponsibly stupid. If he doesn’t, I’ll see him in Hell. [Thanks to CapitolBuzz for the link.] [Technorati tags: boston santorum ]
A reader suggests some nasty, adults-only, Santorum-bashing humor from Savage Love – the results of a contest looking for a sex-related definition of the word “santorum.”
July 11, 2005
Britt Blaser has a terrific post that begins by quoting Tim Bray‘s right-on suggestions: Do our best to ignore the terrorist attacks (because the terrorists want our attention) and try to figure out the “Why” of it.
Unfortunately, our leader — confusing understanding with justifying — thinks asking “Why?” is akin to treason, and our news media is capable of spinning JFK Jr.’s aircraft accident into 48 hours of “No news on the missing plane” coverage. So I’m not very hopeful about these ideas that are so common-sensical that they’re practically Canadian. [Technorati tags: HomelandSecurity TimBray BrittBlaser media]
(a) Disclosure of information by persons having or having had access to classified information that identifies covert agent Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both. [Source, thanks to Salon] [Technorati tag: KarlRove]
If Newsweek’s report is right, Karl Rove is about to be frog-marched — um, liberty-marched — out of the White House. In fact, possibly he will not pass Go and will go straight to jail. This is from Salon:
Rove never said publicly that he had nothing to do with leaking Valerie Plame’s identity to the press, but he sure managed to give people that impression. When CNN asked him about the Plame case last summer, Rove said: “I didn’t know her name. I didn’t leak her name.”
Maybe that was technically correct, but it’s now clear that it was something less than the whole truth. As Newsweek is reporting, Karl Rove may not have referred to Plame by name when he spoke with Time’s Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003. But the email messages Time has turned over to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald show that, in a phone call with Cooper that day, Rove tried to discredit Joseph Wilson’s conclusion that Iraq hadn’t tried to buy uranium from Niger by claiming that Wilson had been assigned to look into the Iraq-Niger connection not by the vice president or by the director of the CIA but by Wilson’s wife. And Wilson’s wife, Rove told Cooper, was a CIA analyst working on WMD issues.
Tim Grieve at Salon thinks this “no-name defense” may protect Rove from perjury charges. But it’s still a crime to rat out a covert CIA agent. Well, what’s one traitorous act when you’re playing hardball, eh Karl? [Technorati tags: KarlRove plame politics]
July 6, 2005
Jonl is engaged in a very interesting conversation about “extreme democracy” at the venerable The Well. (The book Extreme Democracy, to which I contributed a chapter that I am now afraid to read is available for free here. (Since my chapter isn’t one of the numbered ones and I can’t get Acrobat working with Firefox this morning, I don’t know if my chapter is actually in the book.)) [Technorati tags: extremeDemocracy politics jonLebkowsky]
Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR, pegs his latest post to a description of G. Washington in McCullough’s 1776. It’s awkward for me to talk about this because I consult to Edelman PR (Richard has never even hinted that I should talk about his blog, although the company probably likes it when I do) and Richard’s post says nice things about me. Nevertheless: at his blog you can see an established PR firm honestly wrestling with the big change in context the Web is bringing about. If you’ve worked in PR – I did inside corporations for 10 years – you know that the Web excites every inappropriate PR instinct. To traditional PR folks, the Web looks like an opportunity for doing near-zero-cost one-to-one marketing, abusing the Net’s anonymity to manipulate market conversations. In that context, Richard’s current post is all the more to be appreciated, since it acknowledges important limits and scouts for new directions that don’t disrupt the Web’s ecology. [Technorati tags: pr edelmanPR ]
July 5, 2005
There’s something absurd about the impossibly beautiful, impossibly rich Brad Pitt saying “We have the potential to end poverty in our time; we can be that generation,” but there’s also something inspiring about it.
My generation thought we were revolutionizing consciousness. If the Pitt generation revolutionizes economics, history will judge that his generation got it right.
How ironic will it be if it turns out that, compared to the buff and perfected Pitt, the scruffy hippies turn out to be the narcissists?
[Technorati tags: live8 BradPitt]
June 28, 2005
One.org is giving away 50 backstage press passes to bloggers. Dave Sifry explains how you enter the drawing, as do Joe Trippi and Powerline. [Technorati tag: live8]
(Get your own Live 8 graphic like the one above here.)
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