Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) uses Twitter to communicate with constituents (and other folks). But according to TechDirt, he has been using that potent networking tool to “ignite a totally misguided partisan war, pretending (falsely) that Democrats are trying to prevent him from using Twitter.”
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ArsTechnica reports that NASA’s JPL scientists have identified optimal wind farm locations by analyzing eight years of global satellite data. And I missed this announcement: oil baron T. Boone Pickens (personal networth: $2.7bn) is investing $12 billion in a wind farm in west Texas. True to Texas mythology, it will be the largest in the world when completed, and it will start generating power in three years.
Newsweek compares the Pickens campaign with that of another Texan, H. Ross Perot in 1992. After all, oil prices and imports is not a headliner for either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain, the presumed D and R presidential candidates. And Congress and the President aren’t talking about it either.
Pickens — who kicked off his $58 million campaign with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — thinks spending $700 billion annually on foreign oil — to import about 70% of the oil we use — is “dangerous, and it threatens the future of our nation.” He has done a complete about face on this topic (if he were a politician, someone would accuse him of flip-flopping) — in 2005, he pooh-pooed the idea of wind-based energy: Read the rest of this entry »
I’m ashamed to admit this, but last week I heard two FM Seattle DJs (102.5) laughing about and dissing Hillary Clinton in the most misogynist of terms … and I did nothing but yell at the radio in the truck and change stations. I should have picked up my cellphone and called, giving them a piece of my mind. Criticize Clinton’s politics if you feel like it (I do, for example, I think her gas-tax proposal is ill-advised pandering), but criticize the policy, don’t personally attack the woman.
My inaction last week has contributed to my including this latest YouTube clip (tip) that highlights not only MSM misogyny but also questionable comments from Barack Obama and his supporters. (Ack - I was not favorably impressed to see that his campaign used a rap song, talking about b*tches, at a rally).
Please show me if you’ve seen any comparable MSM stereotyping of Obama using words or analogies offensive to blacks.
Using an obscure oversight authority, Thursday night the Senate “disapproved” a recent Federal Communications Commission rule which would relax restrictions on media ownership; it was a voice vote. President Bush has threatened a veto (pdf).
Should the resolution (SJ 28/HJ RES 79)
pass, and be signed into law, it would be only the second time Congress
has nullified an agency rulemaking. This is only the fourth time the
Senate has voted on such a resolution; two of the four are FCC ownership rule rejections. More at About.com.
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The FBI has withdrawn a secret demand that the Internet Archive provide details of a registered user’s personal information. This is reportedly only the third time an organization has succeeded in challenging a National Security Letter (NSL). The enormity of this success: the NYT reports that the “FBI issued nearly 200,000 NSLs between 2003 and 2006.”
With a national security letter, the FBI can “require businesses such as libraries, internet service providers, banks, hospitals or telephone companies to provide customer records on request — no court order (warrant) required.” Courtesy of the US Patriot Act.
At least one judge has ruled that NSLs are unconstitutional due to the gag order; the ruling is under appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
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In honor of Earth Day, here’s a treat from The Colbert Report, an interview with Seattle photographer Chris Jordan. Jordan takes the waste products of our mass culture — such as cell phones, aluminum cans, cigarette butts — considers statistics about their consumption, and creates photographic works of art that, he hopes, will disgust you.
The series is called Running the Numbers, and in it he “turns the waste and refuse of contemporary society into abstract compositions of pattern, light, and color with a stunning clarity and impressive level of detail.” His work is currently on show at the Allen Memorial Arts Museum at Oberlin College.
See his current work. Learn more about Earth Day.
I’ve just re-read the NYT scathing expose of the massive PR machine that is the Bush/Rumsfeld Pentagon, and I’m struck (yet again) at how far removed today’s TV news organizations seem to be from what I believe to be core journalistic ethics: transparency and the absolute avoidance of the appearance of conflict of interest.
I don’t know what’s more amazing: how little oversight the network handlers employed or what appears to be rampant greed (access to power for self or employer) on the part of former military colonels and generals (the only ranks identified). For example, the network news organizations “raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.”
The story will (properly) be used to counter those who insist that citizen journalists or people who use blogging software as their publishing platform are somehow innately inferior to credentialed journalists/news organizations. Read the damning responses from the networks to the 10,000 word expose:
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The goal: put together one aggregated RSS feed that combines the campaign blog feeds from Hillary Clinton (the best URL of the bunch), Barack Obama (bleh) and John McCain (second best URL). The first two: a piece of cake to find the RSS feed link (after ducking past that annoying splash sign-up page).
But McCain’s site had me running (well, clicking) in circles. There is no ’single’ RSS feed for the blog and no feed that contains current posts, even though there are five (5!) category feeds (and no archive links). The dates of the last posts: campaign (14 Mar 2008), economy (28 Nov 2007), health (28 Nov 2007), iraq (28 Nov 2007) and spending (28 Nov 2007). (Yes, those four all end with the same post.) The latest post right now, however, is 8 Apr 2008 (Speech to VFW). Is it the ASPX system?
I’ve put “news” in quotation marks because I’m not convinced that there is much in the way of real news (ie, journalism, fourth estate watchdog, reporting) occurring on cable “news” channels — especially in light of that 24×7 news cycle (which must be filled with something, anything — go watch Network again and cry).
Nevertheless, there is an interesting rally set for 8 am Friday 11 April in NYC, right outside Rockefeller Plaza. Watch the YouTube clip to see why. (tip, Digg)
Note: the event is not associated with any national political campaign and has a modest fundraising goal which has almost already been met. This is not your Ron Paul network.
The Khaleej Times reports that there are now five Middle East undersea cable that have been cut. The first, only now reported, was the Flag Telcom FALCON cable on 23 January, one week before the latest round. (tip)
Here they are:
Mahesh Jaishanker, executive director, Business Development and Marketing, du, said, “The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia.”
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