Monday evening I attended the U. Miami edition of The People Speak: America Debates its Role in the World which was a marquee edition of the 1000 or so related events being held around the country this fortnight.
The run-up to the meeting was not auspicious. Neither in some ways—mostly relating to the presence of Fred Barnes—was the meeting.
Daily Kos, the lively left-leaning political news and commentary site, is leaving Movable Type and switching to Scoop, which is the sort of community-building software I wrote about in the final section of my Habermas paper.
It's been suggested that blogs shouldn't have comments but that they should instead link to each other to make conversations more visible. The dKos move represents the radical counter to that view.
In the end, users will decide what they like best; in the interim there's plenty of room for both approaches, plus some arbitrage.
Several of the Democratic presidential candidates have struggled with the Iraq issue because they are on record as having voted for the bill that permitted the invasion (the issue seems to have flummoxed Clark as well). Dean has made hay with this.
Take Senator Kerry as an example. I think he would probably be a fine President (as would several other of the Democratic hopefuls). He started his campaign as the notional front runner, and surrounded himself with consultants from the Democratic party establishment. And they ran the standard play from the Democratic playbook: if you are ahead, be cautious. Don't blow it. That might have worked against Gephardt, a very studied sort of populist, but it doesn't work against genuine populist insurgents (Dean, maybe Clark).
Caution is not such a terrible trait in a President, at least most of the time, but it proved a wasting strategy for the Kerry campaign. So, at long, long last, John Kerry has finally decided to attack Bush in his foreign policy soft underbelly. While I think that it's a good decision, it does make one wonder about the more general question of why so many of the candidates have avoided the obvious explanation for their vote: Bush lied to us.
The media have noticed that Janet Reno is spending a year as a visiting senior fellow in our Center for Ethics and Public Service, headed by Tony Alfieri.
I'm glad that Tony made this appointment, as I think that the volunteer presence of any former Attorney General, especially one with local ties, enriches the law school community—whatever you may think of her tenure in office. The students certainly seem very happy to have her here, and she's proving to be an interesting person to have around, especially for the folks in the Wrongful Convictions Project.
That said, I'm sure that Tony had to be ready for some heat: there were people around who muttered it would be a bad idea, mostly because there are many people in the Miami community who are still angry about the Elian affair.
All hail the Public Library of Science Biology the free, elitist (in the nicest possible way), peer-reviewed, open-access journal whose inaugural issue appears today. This is the future for journal publishing, especially as even libraries are being priced out of the market for journals, especially scientific ones. All materials in this web-published attack on high-priced dead tree scientific publishing will be subject to the PLoS Open-Access License which happens to be identical to the Creative Commons Attribution License
South of the Suwannee is an excellent blog on Southern history and politics. And, for all that those of us in South Florida joke that “you have to go North to get to the South,” or “Miami is New York's sixth borough,” the fact remains that much of Florida, and much of its government, is Southern or at least Southern-like.
Today, South of the Suwannee offeres The Harvest of Shame Continues, which includes a pointer to a St. Petersburg Times column on how the state bought up agricultural land for $120 million to prevent agricultural run-offs that had destroyed a lake.
Closing down the farming meant throwing 2,500 very poor people out of work. The state set up a $5 million fund to help them — but implemented the program in a way that ensured almost none got any money, or indeed any help. Local officials instead diverted the money to other projects that don't have anything to do with helping the farmworkers.
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