Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Promotion to Marsupial

Posted on February 3, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

It seems that Discourse.net is no longer a mere “Adorable Little Rodent” in the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem but (temporarily at least) a (lesser) Maurauding Marsupial. I think that sounds a lot nicer.

TLB's amusing ranking system is based on the number of inbound links from participants. The lowest category are mere Insignificant Microbes, then Multicellular Microorganisms, Wiggly Worms, Crunchy Crustaceans, Lowly Insects, Slimy Molluscs, Flippery Fish, Crawly Amphibians, Slithering Reptiles. I think that by the time I found the site, discourse.net qualified to be one of the Flappy Birds.

It took four mounths for inbound links from TLB members to double from 33 to 66. Does that mean if all goes well it will only be another four months to break 100 and join the “Large Mammals”? (Note that this works, more or less, if one assumes linear growth or sees this as time-to-double, not that there's the least reason to believe either is in the cards; one must plateau at some point.) I certainly would be radically shocked if I ever got beyond the TLB “large mammal” stage, categories that include the highly linked “Playful Primates,” the very highly linked “Mortal Humans” and the mega-linked “Higher Beings,” although it's nice to see Brad DeLong is an actual “human”.

Now if I could just figure out how to get the TLB system to include me in its traffic rankings, discourse.net might just scrape into the top 250 or so….

Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments

Lynn Nofziger Worries that GW Bush is Not ‘One of Us’

Posted on February 3, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Lynn Nofziger, retired Republican hardball political operator, sits at home and frets:

Like father, like son, maybe. Is George W. Bush following in the footsteps of George H. W. Bush and kicking away his chances of being re-elect? It sure is possible.

True, the times are different and the issues are different, but the Bushes themselves are very much alike in that both have taken substantial leads in the polls and by their own decisions and misjudgments whittled them down to nothing.

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Feel the Outrage

Posted on February 2, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Maybe it's my not having a TV (that's a subject for a whole separate series of posts), or maybe it's living and teaching in South Florida (where sunbathers are topless and students are highly variable in their clothingness), but I have to wonder whether the almost always unnamed supposedly outraged critics who call this pornographic or even “indecent” exist in any substantial numbers. So far I've seen one, just one, name beside FCC Chairman Powell's—that of Jan LaRue, chief counsel for a group called Concerned Women for America, whom AFP quoted as calling it a “pornographic show”.

Pornographic? One breast for a few seconds? Compared to who sits in corporate stadium boxes and why? Or who paid for the stadium and how? Or, for that matter, compared to the various teams' cheerleaders?

Yes, Miami is different, and there are no doubt colder places around where people dress up more, and where undress is more of an issue. But even there, I gather that the sales of skin mags and skin vids are high. I'd sort of gotten the sense that the country was getting over its neo-Puritanism.

So even if these hordes of shocked football fans are more than a creature of the newswriters' imagination, I have to wonder to what extent they are representative of this great nation, or just rather unusually prissy.

If asked, I'd say that the pornography on the air is the violence and cruelty that forms staples of many TV shows. The mean-spirited humor, the portrayal of so many characters as morons, the willingness to serve up news shows that swallow political lies whole or, worse, produce new ones. I could go on and on and on, but you shouldn't take my word for it, I don't have a TV set. Instead, visit Billmon's nicely redesigned Whiskey Bar, and see what he has to say.

Who knew football fans were such wimps?

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Posted in Kultcha | 1 Comment

Today’s News Quiz

Posted on February 2, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Who said it today and about what:

“I have instructed the commission to open an immediate investigation into [the event]. Our investigation will be thorough and swift.”

A) G.W. Bush about allegations that people in his employ illegally exposed CIA Agent Valerie Plame.

B) G.W. Bush about allegations that people in his employ pressured the CIA to exaggerate the Iraq WMD story.

C) Richard Cheney about allegations of war profiteering by Halliburton.

D) John Ashcoft about allegations of psychological torture at Guantanamo Bay detention camps.

E) FCC Chairman Michael Powell about something shown on TV.

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The Daily Telegraph Makes Another Error About Jews

Posted on February 2, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

When I'm in England, I read the Guardian and the Financial Times. The FT may be the best written paper in the English-speaking world, and it has great international coverage. The Guardian has great UK political coverage, good jokes, and they spell as badly as I do. I would never be caught dead with the right-wing and relatively lowbrow Daily Telegraph (before Rupert Murdoch destroyed the Times of London, which could then claim to be the best paper in Britain, the old putdown used to be that 'gentlemen read the Times and their footmen read the Telegraph').

But when I'm in the US I tend to get my British news from the Daily Telegraph online instead of the Guardian. Partly this is because the Telegraph used to have a much better web site although the Guardian is catching up; mostly it's because the DT updates much earlier and I get tomorrow's news before going to bed.

Ordinarily that's ok, especially as I never read the editorial page, but every so often the Telegraph's biases set my teeth on edge. And one subject that they absolutely cannot deal with properly is Jews. The level of casual and unthinking antisemitism is beyond anything we'd tolerate in the US, at least before the new Mel Gibson movie hits the streets.

Today's example is fairly trivial compared to, say, John Keegan's defense of Holocaust denier David Irving but it was pretty typical. (I wrote the DT to complain about the Keegan article, but they edited out my claim of antisemitism, and only ran it online…plus it doesn't seem to be in their archives. The only copy I could find online today is at a Holocaust “revisionist” site, and I'm not going to link to it.)

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Posted in UK | 2 Comments

David Neiwert Worries that We are ‘Slouching Towards Manzanar’

Posted on February 1, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

David Neiwert is writing a great series of posts called “Slouching Towards Manzanar” (the reference is to the Manzanar War Relocation Center). The most recent contribution to the (magnificent) American Street, The Cloud Over the Law is especially worth your time. As it notes,

What the Japanese-American internment revealed for the first time was a hole in the traditional checks and balances of constitutional powers. In wartime, the total deference to the executive branch would lend it nearly comprehensive powers. The post-Sept. 11 response has opened another dimension to this: If wartime — as in the “War on Terror” — becomes itself a never-ending enterprise, then the executive branch's power becomes potentially illimitable.

Exactly.

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