February 10, 2006
Arrested for theft, 14-year-old boy dies after boot camp beating
Fla. Video Said to Show Boot Camp Beating
By BRENT KALLESTAD
Associated Press Writer
[Excerpt]
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- A videotape shows guards brutally beating a boy at a military-style boot camp for juvenile delinquents not long before the teenager died, two lawmakers said Thursday.
Martin Lee Anderson, 14, died Jan. 6 at a Pensacola hospital, a day after he entered the camp because of an arrest for theft.
Anderson complained of breathing difficulties and collapsed during exercises that were part of the entry process at the camp, which was run by the Bay County Sheriff's Office.
Authorities have said he had to be restrained when he became uncooperative during the workout.
State Rep. Gus Barreiro, a Republican, called the videotape "horrific," saying he had "never seen any kid being brutalized ... the way I saw this young man being brutalized."
Looking for love online? Don't forget to retouch your picture.
Corel: Looking for Love Online? Put Your Best Face Forward with Corel Paint Shop Pro
Friday, February 10, 2006
[Press Release Excerpts]
As Valentine's Day draws near, millions of singles will go online in search of romance. So what's the secret to getting noticed online? Well, it's no surprise that those who post their photos receive twice as many emails as those without, according to a study published by economists at M.I.T. and University of Chicago. Not convinced? A Match.com survey revealed that profiles containing photos had fifteen times the response rate as those without them. If you're serious about finding that special someone online, it's time to fix up your photos and put your best face forward.
Me, Myself, and I - Want to edit out your ex? Or maybe you just want to protect the innocent and crop your friends and family out of your photos. Select the Object Remover tool and trim unwanted subjects from your photos in seconds.
Blemish be Gone - Have a photo of yourself that would be great without the blemish that is now long gone? Just select the 'Blemish Fixer' option, target the blemish and with one click it is gone forever. The Blemish Fixer is just one of many makeover tools included in Paint Shop Pro X.
"With 40 million Americans using Internet dating services, online daters need a better way to stand out from the crowd. Having photos that show the real you is the first step," said Blaine Mathieu, general manager, digital imaging at Corel. "You'll be amazed how you start standing out from the online competition after spending a few minutes making simple enhancements and adjustments to your photo collection."
February 05, 2006
Justice Department: Bush has license to kill terrorist suspects
Exclusive: Can the President Order a Killing on U.S. Soil?
Newsweek
[Excerpts]
Feb. 13, 2006 issue - In the latest twist in the debate over presidential powers, a Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States. Steven Bradbury, acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, went to a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week to defend President George W. Bush's surveillance program.
University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein says the post-9/11 congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force against Al Qaeda empowered the president to kill 9/11 perpetrators, or people who assisted their plot, whether they were overseas or inside the United States. On the other hand, Sunstein says, the president would be on less solid legal ground were he to order the killing of a terror suspect in the United States who was not actively preparing an attack.
—Mark Hosenball © 2006 Newsweek, Inc. © 2006 MSNBC.com
Read the full Newsweek story here.
My thoughts on this:
We have been getting the first season of Alias here lately. Anita and I (who never heard of the show before and don't watch much TV at all) have become addicts. The show is as an absolutely perfect demonstration of Siegel's First Law of Media -- it it looks right, it is right.
Alias doesn't always make much sense. How can Jack and Sydney Bristow go to the CIA psychiatrist without being observed by SD-6, for example? I looked through the episode summaries to find an explanation. No luck. maybe I am just missing something.
None of that matters because the people are so beautiful, the acting is so great and the photography is just plan outright sublime.
When I was young, police in British movies always read the suspects their rights. I later felt that made the Miranda decision inevitable in the United States. Seeing Alias, I realized how all this spy stuff sets the context for the American acceptance of government lawlessness. It is expected that secret agents will kill people with perfect impunity. They see it on TV all the time.
I am also noticing the pervasive necrophilia. I don't mean people getting killed, but the morbid fascination with dead bodies, ghosts, the morgue. I guess as the baby boom faces death, necrophilia replaces sex as the principal obsession. There are several series devoted to this.
February 04, 2006
A Brief History of Netroots
In "Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics," Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga claim that Armstrong coined the term "netroots" in 2002.
Actually, a Paper Tiger Productions film, "Net Roots: Cultivating the Digital Park," was -- ironically -- already skeptical of the Internet collectivist hype in 1995. In 1997, lobbyist Jack Bonner formed a division called NETroots to dispel the myth of global warming.
Armstrong did mention netroots in a 2002 blog item about the Dean campaign. "It just came to my head as I was writing the post to describe the online activism of participating in online polls, blogs, and other online activity," he told me.
Whoever coined the term, Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga were prime movers in showing Democrats how to use the netroots to gain votes, troops and cash. Republican activists were well still ahead of the Democrats in exploiting this technology when the 2004 campaign began.
Their online media are mostly a one-way message machine, however. Many of the biggest right wing blogs do not permit reader comments. With the notable exception of FreeRepublic.com, story contributions are usually limited to the blog owner or a select group of trusted associates. Comments are removed and subscribers banned at the slightest sign of independent thinking throughout the rightwing blogosphere.
Armstrong and Moulitsas outflanked the right wing blog machine by deploying Internet applications such as Scoop, an advanced open source content management system that enables any registered user to contribute stories complete with illustrations, polls and other enhancements such as user-rated comments.
Subscribers automatically earn more advanced editing and viewing privileges as their activity is rated by other users and by Scoop's internal criteria. Much richer than a standard blog, Scoop brings true open source journalism to the netroots.
While Armstrong remains a mostly behind-the-scenes political consultant, Moulitsas has evolved into an Internet powerhouse. Scoop-powered dailykos.com (named after Moulitsas' Army nickname, Kos, and inspired by Armstrong's mydd.com blog) received a million visits a day during the peak of the 2004 campaign.
Some enthusiasts claim that DailyKos.com is bigger than the top fifty right wing blogs combined. Internet traffic figures are subject to much subjective interpretation, but by any measure DailyKos.com now dominates the political blogosphere, outranking mighty Instapundit.com by a factor of more than four to one.
Its advertising income has made it possible for Kos to give up political consulting. He now influences public opinion directly, and has raised several hundred thousand dollars for candidates he backed.
Even people who greatly admire Moulitsas were left mistrustful after his repeated predictions of victory in 2004 turned out to be mere wishful thinking. Perhaps Kos was entirely justified in his optimism, but unfortunately he was thinking outside the black box. A lot of other experts predicted a Kerry victory, too -- John Zogby, Warren Mitofsky (whose original exit polls showed Kerry winning), Ruy Teixeira, among others. Maybe they all were on to something. I don't know a technogeek who doubts the feasibility of electronic vote rigging. Are George W. Bush and Company the kind of guys who wouldn't try?
In his zeal to bring the netroots into the mainstream, Markos has expressed great displeasure at what he calls the "fraudsters" who keep trying to get something going about this on Dailykos, defying threats of being banned.
Prudent folk are understandably reluctant to join the tinfoil hat faction, but I don't really get the reluctance to push for a paper trail in voting. It seems like the ultimate wedge issue to me. Why are Republicans against a paper record of electronic voting? The same reason that Enron shredded documents, I guess.
Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics
"Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."
-- Eli Pariser, MoveOn PAC, December 9, 2004
"Crashing the Gate" is a manifesto aimed at fixing the structural defects that have caused the steady decline of Democratic power since Lyndon B. Johnson abdicated in 1968. Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas brilliantly exploited bleeding-edge technology to create a new kind of interactive political media that brought open source journalism to the ordinary Internet user. They helped convert the netroots (the digital equivalent of grassroots) into a $40 million ATM for the Howard Dean campaign.
Their book is at once awesomely inspiring and profoundly depressing. Devoting themselves almost entirely to analysis of political technique rather than ideology, Armstrong and Moulitsas describe the massive superiority of the Republicans in creating and deploying political infrastructure, the greedy incompetence of the Democratic consultants who enrich themselves while losing again and again, the fanatic single-issue pressure groups that have made it impossible for the Democratic party to present a unified, disciplined public image.
"In April 2005, about a hundred progressive leaders descended on Monterrey, California, to extract lessons from the 2004 election debacle while finding ways for progressives to move forward," they write. At the beginning of one session about collaboration, a participant complained, "This isn't speaking to my issue. When are we going to talk about my issue?" Armstrong and Moulitsas write, "That set off an avalanche of copy cat complaints -- 'What about my issue?' -- from all corners of the room." The session then split into five sub-groups, each discussing its own individual issue.
When Rhode Island Democrats were choosing a candidate for Senate, polls showed that Representative Jim Langevin had a 41% to 27% lead over incumbent Republican Lincoln Chafee. Eminently progressive on most other issues, Langevin "opposed legislation that would have allowed women to obtain abortions at overseas military facilities using their own money, and voted for the criminalization of transportation of minors across state lines for abortions without parental consent," they write. Lincoln Chafee had a 100% pro-choice rating. Langevin withdrew under heavy fire from NARAL and the National Organization of Women. NARAL endorsed Chafee for Senator.
A few weeks later, Chafee voted to confirm pro-life (and more important, pro-business) Janice Rogers Brown to the federal appeals court in D.C. Chafee voted against the Alito filibuster (when there might have been a chance of stopping the nomination). Then he polished his pro-choice rating by casting the purely symbolic lone Republican vote against confirmation. So he was able to have it both ways. But if Democrats had controlled the Judiciary Committee, neither Brown nor Alito might ever have made it to the Senate floor.
Armstrong and Moulitsas argue that other self-serving political strategy errors deprive the Democrats of some of their strongest candidates. Armstrong and Moulitsas claim that the grotesque caricature of Howard Dean as some kind of unelectable loony leftist didn't originate with Republicans but with Democratic insiders, who feared his threat to their control of party policy and funding. With the exception of his very strong and early opposition to the Iraq war, as governor of Vermont Dean was a classic centrist, a very effective fiscal conservative. Yet the word started going out that he was a wild man.
Armstrong and Moulitsas write:
"On November 7, 2003, a mysterious new group called Americans for Jobs and Healthcare ran a series of ads against Dean in Iowa, distorting his record, criticizing him for his positions on trade, Medicare growth, and gun rights, implying that Dean was not a progressive. The worst of the lot zoomed into the eyes of Osama Bin Laden on the cover of Time magazine while the announcer intoned, 'We live in a very dangerous world.... Howard Dean just cannot compete with George Bush on foreign policy.'"
The ads were financed by forces backing Kerry and Gephardt. CNN helped bury Dean by showing the dubious footage of his grotesquely distorted "scream" over and over again, but it was his own party that depicted him as a political vampire and drove the wooden stake into his heart.
The main theme of "Crashing the Gate" is not ideology, but winning. Democrats mainly lose on the ground, not the issues, the authors observe. For the past forty years, conservative Republicans have been training and supporting an astoundingly effective cadre of killer bee operatives. Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership has been doing its best to imitate Republicans on the issues, while ignoring their ferociously effective political marketing techniques on the ground.
Many will disagree with one or another of the prescriptions in "Crashing the Gate" for curing the Democratic rot, but this book could be the most important political work of 2006. Although the language is blunt, the aggressive self-confidence a bit obnoxious at times, the overall enthusiasm and just plain political good sense offer Democrats a tantalizing glimpse of hope in a very gloomy time.