It is getting increasingly more difficult for me to read conservative blogs. Take, for example, this disingenous post by Glenn Reynolds on the situation in Darfur:
Strange that Kofi Annan is unwilling to call this genocide.
I am not sure where Reynolds got the idea that Annan was the impetus behind a refusal to call the Darfur [...]
A post on the Harvard Democrats mailing list alerted me to the fact that Jack Valenti, CEO of the MPAA, would be replaced by none other than the director of the Harvard Institute of Politics, Dan Glickman. All indications seems to indicate that Glickman will continue in Valenti's footsteps. From the WaPo:
"Privacy and protecting the [...]
The Globe reports today on a white paper released last week by Kerry's campaign outlining his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Entitled "John Kerry: Strengthening Israel's Security and Bolstering the US-Israel Special Relationship," it is critical of the Palestinian leadership and affirms several Israeli policies. You can read it at Electronic Initifada or Jews for [...]
This BBC News article reports that text messages in China may start to be automatically monitored, allowing the government to discover dissent more easily.
Venus Info Tech Ltd said in a press release that its surveillance system worked by filtering algorithms based on key words and combinations of key words.
Certain key words could trigger an automatic [...]
One of my bigger annoyances about RSS feeds is that many large media outlets feel it necessary to add query strings to the URLs in their RSS feeds. Among the offenders are the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Slate.
Why is this annoying? I use Sage, a Mozilla Firefox extension, as my RSS reader. [...]
From an interview at Talking Points Memo:
So if I say, if there's ten people in the room and there's a guy out in the hall screaming and he's bothering us and I say “We ought to stop that guy. We ought to stop that guy.” And everyone says, “Oh no, no. This guy's a bad [...]
Sorry about that. Moving took longer than I expected. We were supposed to get cable internet on July 3, but did not.
Found a link on Scripting News to this interesting Wired article about the New York Times' relationship with Google and the Internet in general. Adam Penenberg remarks that New York Times articles rarely come up in Google searches.
Two years ago, Martin Nisenholtz, chief executive of New York Times Digital, bet $1,000 that nytimes.com would outrank [...]
From the Guardian comes the story of Patrick Foster and Roger Waite, two Oxford students who are in trouble because they discovered serious vulnerabilities in their university's network which allowed for access to students' e-mail accounts, instant messaging conversations, and CCTV broadcasts. This discovered them in the course of writing an article for their college [...]
According to a Washington Post article, former Bears coach Mike Ditka will not replace Jack Ryan as the Republican candidate for Barack Obama's Illinois Senate seat.
"I don't know how I'd do on the Senate floor if I got in a confrontation with someone I didn't appreciate or maybe didn't appreciate me," said Ditka, known nearly [...]
I was browsing a post on Political Animal which directed me to a fake Bush-Cheney website, which in turn led to the real site. A quick look at the right hand sidebar of thehome page shows the "Bush-Cheney Quick Vote," which at first glance seems like a standard web poll. Select an option besides "All [...]
Dave Winer writes about getting a New York Times article as the third hit in a Google search for Britt Blaser in New York. He calls it "a milestone." I disagree, as he used the words "new york" in his query (which, when used alone, will bring up the Times as the first result); searching [...]
From Eschaton comes this ridiculously funny New Yorker piece about Cheney's use of profanity on the Senate floor:
?Oh, it's like that?? Mr. Cheney queried.
?Whut? Whut?? Mr. Leahy shot back.
?Once again,? Mr. Cheney replied (quite obviously quoting a lyric from Ice Cube's 1990 album, ?AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted?), ?it's on.?
As a quick-thinking senatorial aide switched on the [...]
Corrente is one of my favorite political blogs. Not just because it hails from Philadelphia, but because they have incisive commentary. In their recent post on Minnesota Republicans being asked to provide political data on their neighbors, I am afraid that they have been fooled. They quote Larry Colson, Bush's e-campaign chair in Minnesota, calling [...]
I was reading today's music news over at Pitchfork (regrettably, they never answered my query about RSS; I might want to look into doing a screen-scrape, as the only other RSS feed I could find seems to be broken, despite being active not two months ago). The top story is about the Decemberists' heading back [...]
Holden on Eschaton posts about an AP article with an obvious grammatical error in its title. I assume that newspapers are not allowed to change the content of the AP articles that they syndicate; the error appears at both the New York Times and the Guardian.
The overflight by Israeli fighter jets is apparently retaliation for [...]
The Inquirer takes a strange angle in this article (entitled iPods will be free for wealthy kids) on yesterday's news about iPods being delivered for free to Duke University freshmen.
Giving the digital 'Duke box' away to one of the few universities where most of the kids can afford to buy them, is probably one of [...]
Just finished a RSS 2.0 feed for Pitchfork's music news, as I talked about doing yesterday. I also changed all of the Crimson feeds to RSS 2.0; the change should take place when the feeds next update. The URL has also changed, but I made symbolic links in order to make it transparent.
Update: Official Pitchfork [...]
Haaretz reports that Avi Dichter, head of Israel's domestic security agency Shin Bet, has the names of up to two hundred Israeli citizens who want Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to die, and could be willing to support his assassination.
Responding to Yahad MK Ran Cohen's query as to whether the Shin Bet knows the precise identities [...]
"Walt" on Redstate.org writes about a letter that MoveOn.org sent to its supporters, asking for help in their anti-Fox campaign. Walt takes issue with MoveOn's wish that people "push" Congressmen to speak out against Fox.
It sounds like intimidation to me.
That's funny. Where I come from, they call it lobbying.
You see, Walt, our Congressmen are public [...]
BoingBoing points to A Softer World. All of the comics are cool, and most of them are quite funny. I like this one, especially. Not because of its political message, but the idea of "Baby Doom."
UPDATE: More Baby Doom!
Tim LaHaye wrote a letter in response to Nicholas Kristof's column condemning the last book in LaHaye's "Left Behind" series, Glorious Appearing.
Comparing my book "Glorious Appearing" to "fundamentalist Islamic tracts" is a real stretch. The Islamic radicals who bomb the innocent are not nice people!
No, Islamic radicals are not nice people. Kristof was noting that [...]
The Beeb reports that the Ghanian Interior Minister is angry at the refugees in the Cap Anamur case. Reportedly picked up in a rubber dinghy by the German aid ship Cap Anamur, the refugees claimed to be fleeing the upheaval in Darfur. However, the great majority of them were found to be from Ghana, invalidated [...]
The Guardian reports on the use of "anti-social behaviour orders" (ASBOs) in Manchester.
Since Asbos were introduced five years ago, Manchester has issued more than 300 orders - almost twice as many as any other city in the country - and has led the field not only in numbers, but in the imaginative audacity of its [...]
From W's campaign blog comes a link to SportsIllustrated.com's latest poll: which presidental candidate is the bigger athlete and sports fan?
I would assume that several avid readers of georgewbush.com have already voted on the poll, resulting in a sample with skewed political leanings. The title of the post is "Who's the Bigger Sports Fan?," which [...]
As you can see from the previous post, I have learned how to make inline images with CSS (it was actually quite simple; I just never remembered to look it up). Since images seem to brighten up the page, I will continue to use them.
Blackspotters,
We found it! After two years of researching shoe plants in Slovakia, Poland, Indonesia, China and South Korea, the hunt for our factory is over.
When the search started, we found Phil Knight's Nike had plunged sneaker manufacturing into a macabre scene of export processing zones and sweatshop labor. To make a sneaker, all roads led [...]
"Atrios," until today the most famous anonymous blogger (and arguably the most famous liberal blogger), is among the bloggers attending the Democratic convention. So is Dave Winer, previously of the Berkman Center, who pointed to a post on TalkLeft (which confirms my suspicion that bloggers are the nicest people) and had this to say:
Hearing that [...]
Crooked Timber reports that the lead in the Iowa Electronic Markets' 2004 US Presidental Election Winner Takes All Market shifted to Kerry (blue) earlier this month. Unfortunately (as you can see in the image to your right), the lead has shifted back to Bush (yellow). Current asking prices are 0.501 to 0.499.
I blogged about the [...]
Pandagon reports on Nader's attempts to get press credentials for the ongoing Democratic Convention:
It's quintessential Nader, though - a totally unreasonable demand premised on a horrible argument which, when gone unmet, will totally confirm every unreasonable thing he already thinks. He knew when the convention was. He knew the process to apply for credentials. He's [...]
But this is not just any string. This is special string. What makes this string so amazing?
What makes this particular piece of string so special is, in part [emphasis mine], the fact that it has traveled to Israel, to the ancient tomb of Rachel the Matriarch, and returned, imbued with the essence of protection.
I assume [...]
Recently, I have been reading a number of articles touting the benefits of table-less HTML layouts, like this one at Stopdesign.
Interested in standards-based HTML design as I am, this morning I decided to research converting the Harvard International Review's website to XHTML. I had some problems with the 3-column layout (because of the use of [...]
As you may have noticed, I have made improvements to the "commenting experience" at this blog. The first is the "Recent Comments" section, which can currently be seen on the sidebar at your right. This was simple copy and pasting from the WordPress Wiki entry "Recent Comments."
The other improvement can be seen on the individual [...]
New York Senator Chuck Schumer on blogging:
ES: What do you think of blogging, and the fact that the Convention offered approximately 35 bloggers credentials?
CS: I think blogging is great. It supports a dialogue that reaches out to everyone, and in our new interconnected, more democratic world, blogging fits the bill. It has its tentacles that [...]
GeorgeWBush.com introduces a new "feature" on the campaign blog - Barbara and Jenna's Journal!
Hi there. As you probably know we have decided to start campaigning for our Dad. As we travel across America, we'll keep you updated on our trips through the blog. Last week was our first trip alone on the campaign trail, with [...]
My little sister is complaining that I am spending too much time blogging and not enough talking to her, but after *almost* blogging about the same back-to-school girl appearing on both Dell and Gateway's website, I could not pass this up. I was reading Adam Penenberg's latest Wired article when I came across a link [...]
Matthew Yglesias points to this Weekly Standard article suggesting that Harvard's undergraduate population is ready to hear the siren call of conservatism.
Thanks in part to this enhanced conservative presence, the terms of campus debate have shifted rightward. Harvard history professor Stephan Thernstrom estimates that even in the 1970s, only 10-15 percent of the student body [...]
The first two paragraphs of Maureen Dowd's latest column, "Banned in Boston":
BOSTON ? The Democratic convention stage has the hushed mahogany dignity of a Republican men's club: all dark wood paneling with maroon and faux marble trim. The podium has an ersatz presidential seal with a flag. Even the hoi polloi in the press are [...]
I think it is telling that the two Biblical quotations that Byron from Slings And Arrows uses to elucidate his views in "Democrats and Deity," which analyses the Democratic Party's outreach to religion, both come from the New Testament:
First off, the Democrats are looking at faith from the wrong direction. They see the correlation between [...]
From the end of a New York Times article on an increase in foreign kidnappings and the delay of a national conference important for the January elections:
Iraqi employees of The New York Times, whose names have been withheld for their safety, [emphasis mine] contributed reporting for this article.
Stereogum posts a link to a Rolling Stone article on the possible return of the lead singer of the band Weezer, Rivers Cuomo, to Harvard this fall. You can read Cuomo's readmission essay on myspace.com:
After the initial failure of my band?s second album, Pinkerton, I decided not to return to school in the fall of [...]