31 August 2005 @ 12:12PM >> Every time I walk past the pit in Lower Manhattan, I feel a pit in my stomach. The physical destruction of September 11th, while massive, was still limited to a relatively small part of a large city. I can’t even begin to imagine what the residents of New Orleans are feeling, knowing that much of their city is lost. 80% of the city is underwater, and that water—filled with debris, raw sewage, industrial chemicals, and floating corpses—is still rising in many parts. Hurricane Katrina may have left one million people homeless, and those displaced from New Orleans may not be able to return for 3 to 4 months.

After September 11th, my strongest urge was to see the towers rebuilt, exactly as they were. No doubt, many New Orleans residents feel the same way about their city. Unfortunately, their city is a below-sea-level bowl built upon compacting sediment deposited centuries ago by the Mississippi River. And as that sediment packs down—about an inch every 33 months—the city sinks further below sea level. Even without a storm like Katrina, the long-term prognosis for New Orleans was not good.

Billions of dollars in insurance money, government relief, and donations from people here and abroad will now be pouring in to rebuild New Orleans. But as heartless as it may sound, we must question the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans in its current location. Eventually, a rebuilt New Orleans will be hit by another storm, and until that happens, it will just continue sinking further below the sea.

Marvels of engineering have allowed man to triumph over nature many times before, but we should also pick our battles wisely. Simply put, in the 50-to-100-year long run, present day New Orleans most likely can’t be saved.

The urge to rebuild is understandable. I felt it after September 11th, when a relatively small portion of my city was knocked down. The folks who survived the near-total destruction of New Orleans need homes, and they deserve to see rebuilding done in their names. But should New Orleans be rebuilt where it is now? Unless the city is relocated, at some point in the future, we’re going to find ourselves in the exact same position as today.

There are some battles nature will always win. Let’s not compound today’s tragedy by guaranteeing it again in the future.

30 August 2005 @ 11:06AM >> Documentary filmmaker Andrew Marcus recently told me he’d be traveling to Crawford, Texas to cover the protesters and anti-protesters. That was a few days ago, and he has now posted some pictures and video from his visit.

26 August 2005 @ 6:16PM >> Many have grown bored with the predictable reporting from the establishment media. It’s simply a running count of deaths—unless, of course, it’s the enemy that dies, in which case you never hear about it.

For a good example of what real war reporting looks like, you must look outside the major media. This is the kind of reporting that occurred in World War II—and rarely since, it seems.

26 August 2005 @ 6:09PM >> Jack Kelly reports:

Colonel Thomas Spoehr is annoyed with New York Times reporter Michael Moss, for what I think is a good reason.

The story is a good example of how The New York Times manufactures bad news from Iraq.

24 August 2005 @ 10:32PM >> The media is taking great pains to paint the Iraqi constitution as a major failure because Islam is mentioned as the country’s religion. Alenda Lux notes that the Afghani constitution contains similar phrasing:

Could someone let me know where to find the Post or Times article predicting the descent of the Dark Ages on Afghanistan because of the provisions in their Constitution?

Yet, almost two years later, Hamid Karzai is still President, no Islamic Revolution, record numbers of women are registering to vote and registering to run for the Wolesi Jirga, for which there is a provision stating that a minimum required number of seats that must go to women. The only threats to women come from the neo-Taliban. All ethnic groups have equal rights under the Constitution, and a draft for the new national anthem came out last week, the text of which symbolizes the equality of the different ethnic groups. (And Afghanistan is FAR more ethnically diverse than is Iraq.)

Meanwhile, Instapundit gathered a good collection of links with commentary on the new Iraqi constitution and notes:

My own sense is that this stuff isn’t as important as we like to make it. Americans are unusually legalistic and unusually focused on constitutions. But plenty of constitutions have wonderful language on paper (the old Soviet constitution was great that way) and plenty of countries (Britain, for example) manage to get by without written constitutions at all. What matters more is political culture. If the Iraqi people want a free, prosperous country and are willing to work for it, they’ll get that. If they don’t, or aren’t, then they won’t.

24 August 2005 @ 3:08PM >> The American Film Renaissance festival, which I attended last year, is now holding a screenwriting contest. The theme is “The Art of Freedom,” and the winner will walk away with a cool $2,000. Not bad!

23 August 2005 @ 10:11AM >> The International Freedom Center, the entity that started out at a September 11th memorial at Ground Zero, has for some time looked in danger of becoming an America-bashing museum. The New York Daily News reports the latest:

“Don’t feature America first,” the IFC has been advised by the consortium of 14 “museums of conscience” that quietly has been consulting with the Freedom Center for the past two years over plans for the hallowed site. “Think internationally, where America is one of the many nations of the world.”

[...]

Located in nine countries on five continents, the coalition museums chronicle apartheid in South Africa, slavery in Senegal, torture in Argentina, racism in the South and internment of Japanese-Americans in California, along with other historical horrors.

“No one in the civilized world would ever defend what happened on 9/11,” said Sarwar Ali, the coalition’s chairman and a trustee of the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh.

“But what happened after 9/11 - with restrictions placed on human rights and the cycle of revenge and the allegations of human rights abuses in prisons - must also be explored,” Ali said in a call from London.

Coalition members gathered for their annual conference at a Holocaust site in the Czech Republic in July 2004 - and assailed the United States for “reasserting its power in an arrogant way,” the conference report shows.

[...]

At the conference, the coalition also leveled barbs at the IFC: “The Freedom Center is a caricature of the typical American response to everything [telling every story from an American viewpoint].”

September 11th was an attack on the United States. If this story isn’t told from an American viewpoint, whose viewpoint should we choose? That of the attackers?

The International Freedom Center was an ill-conceived idea to begin with. It should be scrapped altogether and replaced with a simple September 11th Memorial that can’t be politicized.

23 August 2005 @ 9:15AM >> Dissent is patriotic, we’re often told. So this must be the highest form of patriotism:

The USS Iowa joined in battles from World War II to Korea to the Persian Gulf. It carried President Franklin Roosevelt home from the Teheran conference of allied leaders, and four decades later, suffered one of the nation’s most deadly military accidents.

Veterans groups and history buffs had hoped that tourists in San Francisco could walk the same teak decks where sailors dodged Japanese machine-gun fire and fired 16-inch guns that helped win battles across the South Pacific.

[...]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a former San Francisco mayor, helped secure $3 million to tow the Iowa from Rhode Island to the Bay Area in 2001 in hopes of making touristy Fisherman’s Wharf its new home.

But city supervisors voted 8-3 last month to oppose taking in the ship, citing local opposition to the Iraq war and the military’s stance on gays, among other things.

“If I was going to commit any kind of money in recognition of war, then it should be toward peace, given what our war is in Iraq right now,” Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said.

Update: In the San Francisco Chronicle, Cinnamon Stillwell reports that San Francisco has effectively declared itself a “military-free zone.”

22 August 2005 @ 9:07AM >> Punish those who are enforcing the law, while rewarding those who break it:

Spent shells litter the ground at what is left of the firing range, and camouflage outfits still hang in a storeroom. Just a few months ago, this ranch was known as Camp Thunderbird, the headquarters of a paramilitary group that promised to use force to keep illegal immigrants from sneaking across the border with Mexico.

Now, in a turnabout, the 70-acre property about two miles from the border is being given to two immigrants whom the group caught trying to enter the United States illegally.

The land transfer is being made to satisfy judgments in a lawsuit in which the immigrants had said that Casey Nethercott, the owner of the ranch and a former leader of the vigilante group Ranch Rescue, had harmed them.

“Certainly it’s poetic justice that these undocumented workers own this land,” said Morris S. Dees Jr., co-founder and chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which represented the immigrants in their lawsuit.

Mr. Dees said the loss of the ranch would “send a pretty important message to those who come to the border to use violence.”

And what about the message it sends to those who would come here illegally? Come and get it, boys, while the gettin’s good!

20 August 2005 @ 6:29PM >> The appropriate punishment for these kids would be for all their worldly possessions to be sold, with the proceeds given to the people who were beaten. Then, they’d be sentenced to a life of homelessness themselves.

20 August 2005 @ 6:26PM >> Mickey Kaus disagrees with my take on the Krugman article, while James B. rebuts Kaus.

My main problem with Krugman’s article is the apparent surety with which he makes the claim that Gore was the rightful winner in 2000. It was a close election, and trying to cast it in such certain terms is bogus. There were many scenarios in which Bush would have won, and one variant of counting in which Gore would have won. The lack of specificity in Krugman’s claim is a deliberate attempt to mislead the reader into believing that no scenario showed Bush the winner, whereas the reality is that most of them did. This is a pretty feeble foundation upon which to build the argument that your guy was robbed.

19 August 2005 @ 10:47AM >> In a New York Times op-ed piece, Paul Krugman pulls a fast one with the truth:

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida’s ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore.

Sorry, Paul, but that’s just not true. In fact, the two studies commissioned by various media organizations found the exact opposite: Bush would have won a full state-wide recount.

According to CNN:

If a recount of Florida’s disputed votes in last year’s close presidential election had been allowed to proceed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican George W. Bush still would have won the White House, two newspapers reported Wednesday.

The Miami Herald and USA Today conducted a comprehensive review of 64,248 “undercounted” ballots in Florida’s 67 counties that ended last month.

The other study had similar findings:

A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies [...]

The Times should know better than to print Krugman’s blatant misrepresentation. After all, the paper is listed as the first sponsor of the NORC study:

Included in the group are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Tribune Publishing (which includes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and a number of other newspapers), CNN, the Associated Press, the St. Petersburg Times and the Palm Beach Post.

Of course, because Krugman doesn’t actually name the studies he’s apparently citing, he might not be talking about these two, which were widely regarded as the most thorough, comprehensive and credible. Maybe the consortium of Mad Magazine, Cracked and Comedy Central came to different conclusions.

The Times may eventually issue a retraction on Krugman’s fact-twisting, but by that point, hundreds of thousands of people will have read Krugman’s article and assumed that, since it ran in the nation’s “newspaper of record,” it must be true. The correction itself—if it is ever issued at all—will be buried days later in a small corner of the paper and will barely be noticed.

Good thing all those editors at the Times provide the layers of rigorous fact-checking that blogs lack!

18 August 2005 @ 5:27PM >> Several people have asked for scanned copies of last weekend’s Daily Telegraph profile, the text of which I posted earlier this week. Now that I have a copy of the paper myself, I was able to do so:

“Meet the Right-wing Michael Moore” by Damian Thompson (The Daily Telegraph, London, 13 August 2005) [4.2MB, PDF file]

In the interest of symmetry, I also scanned the New York Sun profile that ran earlier this year:

“A Conservative Answer to Michael Moore” by Jacob Gershman (The New York Sun, 21 January 2005) [7.1MB, PDF file]

Note: You may need to zoom in when viewing the PDF files; the newspaper text appears very small unless zoomed.

18 August 2005 @ 11:18AM >> Hollywood vs. the old guard of the newspaper industry:

Hollywood is about to deliver bad news to the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and, to a lesser extent, other big-city dailies around the country. Every major movie studio is rethinking its reliably humongous display ad buys in those papers because those newsosaur readers are, to quote one mogul, “older and elitist” compared to younger, low-brow filmgoers — so it makes no sense to waste the dough.

Wait, it gets worse: I’ve learned that at least two Hollywood movie studios have decided to drastically cut their newspaper display ads as soon as possible.

[...]

“We’re rethinking our newspaper ads and I mean, literally, on every movie. Everybody is,” one movie mogul tells me. “The only people who read newspapers are older and elitist. Movies like Sky High don’t need ads in The New York Times. But the studios did it because newspapers were seen as a necessary evil.

“But I don’t think it’s as important anymore.”

17 August 2005 @ 12:37PM >> NBC morning news man Matt Lauer, on the receiving end of a soldier’s wisdom.

16 August 2005 @ 9:49PM >> Imagine this scenario: your town wants to take your land and give it to someone who’ll generate more tax revenue for the town government. You don’t like that very much, so you refuse, and the town then sues you. The case goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sides with the town.

You now must move off the land you once owned, so the town can take it for someone else.

Is this just a nightmare vision of an out-of-control government? No, this is the new reality in a country whose Supreme Court grants only periodic deference to the words written in our Constitution.

But as bad as that is, imagine how you’d feel if the town then sent you a bill after all that. A bill for what, you might ask? For the back rent that the town now says you owe for the time that you occupied “their” land while fighting them in court.

Sad but true:

The U.S. Supreme Court recently found that the city’s original seizure of private property was constitutional under the principal of eminent domain, and now New London is claiming that the affected homeowners were living on city land for the duration of the lawsuit [which started in 2000] and owe back rent. It’s a new definition of chutzpah: Confiscate land and charge back rent for the years the owners fought confiscation.

15 August 2005 @ 4:09PM >> The Daily Telegraph of London profiles Evan Coyne Maloney: “Undercover film-maker Evan Coyne Maloney is making a name for himself as the fresh-faced tormentor of the American Left. He tells Damian Thompson about his new documentary, in which he exposes the tyranny of political correctness on US Campuses.” More >>

15 August 2005 @ 2:46PM >> Over at The Corner, the website of National Review magazine, John Derbyshire mentions the profile in the Telegraph:

I have just been watching the movie “Brainwashing 101,” made by Evan Coyne Maloney. (You can view it online here.)

Maloney’s work is new to me, though I suspect I’m behind the curve here & you’ve all been watching him for months. I actually read about him in one of the London newspapers. He doesn’t seem to get much coverage over here. Wonder why?

One of Coyne’s premises is that if he can get his films distributed, the parents of America will have their eyes opened about leftist indoctrination on our very expensive college campuses, and alumni donations will be hit. I think he underestimates the degree to which the American middle classes, especially Boomer parents, have bought into the PC package. Bill Clinton won two terms.

I just e-mailed a response:

Mr. Derbyshire,

Thank you for the plug on “The Corner”. As far as I know, Jonah Goldberg is the only Cornerite familiar with my work, although he may know me only as “the Brain Terminal guy.”

Also, although I take your point about President Clinton, he was elected twice in a very different media environment than exists today. There are many more conservative voices who have platforms today than in 1992 or even 1996. And with the continually better technology available at ever-cheaper prices, we can build our own platforms now. That’s what I did online, and it led to my being able to make a feature-length film.

One by one, various channels have expanded to allow the inclusion of views that, for a generation, were largely shut out of the establishment media. Radio, newspapers, television and book publishing have all been slowly opening up. What’s next? Film.

So, I see the trend in all media, and I’m optimistic. Somewhere in the film business, there’s a smart distributor sitting at a desk who understands that the best place to make money is in an untapped market.

I also don’t share your pessimism about college campuses. Public reaction to the recent campus scandals—from Ward Churchill on down—has been fairly uniform in its negativity. When the general public sees the overall picture of academia today, they will be quite shocked, I think, perhaps enough to ask for some changes.

To clarify one point, the purpose of my upcoming film (”Indoctrinate U”) isn’t to starve colleges of funding, but to cause people to ask what we’re getting for our money.

At my alma mater, Bucknell University, one year of education will cost nearly $40,000 per student. Some of this money goes to financing things like the school’s “Women’s Resource Center”, which has full-time employees who arrange bus trips for students to go to Washington and protest the Bush Administration. Some of it pays for Bucknell’s Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Awareness, which has university staffers who use the office to encourage students to adopt their political views on gay marriage. The university may need to admit a dozen students each year just to keep those offices afloat. (The exact number is an estimate, since the university refuses to state how much those offices cost.)

I think you could find a consensus of people in America—right and left—who would support smarter spending by universities. Fiscal conservatives would prefer more prudent spending for its own sake, while egalitarian liberals would like the idea of a less expensive education being available to people who can’t afford it now.

Students and parents pay tuition, alumni give donations, and taxpayers subsidize public universities directly and private ones indirectly through tax breaks. Just about everybody in the country is paying for higher education right now.

Institutions that take your money have a responsibility to spend it wisely. And, if money is being wasted, then count me an optimist, because I think people will make themselves heard...assuming they know about the problems in the first place!

Take care,

Evan Coyne Maloney

13 August 2005 @ 6:18PM >> Today’s (Saturday) edition of the London Telegraph has a profile of me by Damian Thompson. Unfortunately, it is not available on their website, so I can’t link to it. I haven’t seen it yet, either, but I’ve been getting some encouraging e-mails. To the newfound visitors from the UK, welcome!

Update: Thanks to some helpful British readers, I now have the text of the Telegraph profile and have posted it online.

12 August 2005 @ 10:02AM >> The Tallahassee Democrat reports:

Florida State needs a victory in court to keep its Seminoles nickname without suffering potentially damaging penalties to many of its teams.

[...]

The NCAA [...] will not allow such nicknames or symbols to be on team uniforms or clothing in NCAA postseason competition beginning Feb.1. There would be no such ban for the regular season. FSU and Illinois were among at least 18 schools determined to have “hostile or abusive” nicknames, symbols and mascots.

That rule will not affect FSU’s football team - the school’s most visible team and biggest moneymaker - because the NCAA does not have a championship format for that sport. Other sports, including baseball and softball, regularly host NCAA postseason competition.

“We’re not going to change the name - that’s not an option,” [Florida State University President T. K.] Wetherell told the Tallahassee Democrat Friday evening. “We would not do that.”

Wetherell, who was angered by the decision, said he had it in his mind “to paint (the Seminole logo) three times as big on the field (at Doak Campbell Stadium).”

Apparently, Florida State’s president wasn’t the only one angered. So was Max B. Osceola Jr,. a Seminole Tribal Council member:

Osceola said the Seminole Tribe of Florida disagrees with the NCAA’s decision and determination that FSU’s nickname and symbols are “hostile and abusive.” Osceola was also concerned that his tribe was not approached by the NCAA regarding the matter.

“It’s like history - they left the natives out,” Osceola said. “They have non-natives telling natives what’s good for them or how they should use their name. You have a committee made up of non-natives telling people that they can not use a native name when you have a native tribe - a tribal government, duly elected and constituted - that said they agree with Florida State.

“There are some names, like the NFL team the Washington Redskins - that’s derogatory. Those are abusive and hostile but not this.”

10 August 2005 @ 2:48PM >> Senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey is now running for governor of the state. About a year ago, New Jersey’s previous governor, Jim McGreevey, left office in disgrace after it was revealed that he gave the state’s highest anti-terrorism position—a six-figure job—to a man with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Although McGreevey spun his resignation as an affirmation of his sexuality, in actuality he resigned not because he got caught with his pants down, but because he was stuffing the pants of his male lover with money from the taxpayers of New Jersey.

New Jersey voters, who have long grumbled about the level of corruption in the state government, are not likely to look kindly on the latest revelations about candidate Corzine:

Judging by his reaction thus far, Corzine believes his best bet is to stay close-mouthed behind an avowal of his right to privacy. Problem is, new details of his relationship with union leader Carla Katz keep trickling out. The fact that Katz also won’t say anything just lends an added air of someone trying to hide something.

[...]

It all dates back to Corzine’s affair with Katz, who is president of Local 1034 of the Communications Workers of America, which represents about half of the state government’s unionized workers — and with which any Corzine administration would have to undertake intensive negotiations.

In 2003, during the course of their relationship, Corzine loaned Katz $470,000 — about $100,000 more than she needed to buy her ex-husband’s share of a 19th-century Hunterdon County farmhouse.

Shortly after their romance ended — and about a week before he announced for governor — Corzine forgave the loan, converting it into a gift, and paying another $200,000 in taxes. He says he did so because Katz “didn’t have the resources” to repay the loan. A few months later, her union endorsed his candidacy.

Though he insists everything was above board, it later turned out that Corzine had made two other sizable personal loans to women — but the one to Katz was the only one he didn’t report on his U.S. Senate disclosure forms.

Although Corzine didn’t give any state money to Katz, it is fair to ask how the cozy relationship between Corzine and this union boss will affect the state if Corzine becomes governor. After all, Katz heads the union that represents more New Jersey state employees than any other. How well Katz’s union does in negotiations with the state will determine how much her union members get paid by New Jersey taxpayers.

Whereas Jim McGreevey gave away a state job worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, a sweetheart contract for the Communications Workers of America could cost Jersey taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

In whose interests will a Governor Corzine be working, the citizens of New Jersey, or the members of his former lover’s union?

9 August 2005 @ 11:23AM >> Weeks after the financial scam came to light where Air America ended up with nearly $1 million from a primarily government-funded charity for underprivileged kids, the left-wing radio network’s signature host Al Franken finally addressed the issue on his radio show:

Al Franken says 20,000 poor kids and old people weren’t the only victims of an exec who allegedly arranged a Bronx charity’s mega-buck “loan” to Air America.

“About three weeks into the life of Air America, I became an involuntary investor — I stopped being paid,” Franken told listeners yesterday [...]

Screw the kids, Al’s not getting paid!

Thank you, Al, for reminding us who the real victims are here.

Meanwhile, Captain’s Quarters has assembled a convenient scoreboard comparing coverage over the last month of Martha Stewart’s legal-financial woes and those of Air America:

Media Outlet	Air America	Martha Stewart
New York Times	0	16
Washington Post	0	10
Los Angeles Times	0	3
CBS News	0	1
ABC News	0	4
Total:	0	34

Although these numbers were compiled on Sunday, to my knowledge, none of these outlets have covered the case in the last two days.

9 August 2005 @ 10:05AM >> Two female U.S. Army captains recently won their respective state beauty pageants.

One of the benefits of having female officers is knowing how much more offensive it is to the enemy. And the fact that some of them are this attractive might entice the Jihadists to visit their 72 virgins a little sooner...

8 August 2005 @ 9:46AM >> First Christina Aguilera music, now Harry Potter? Oh well, at least the terror suspects are reading it by choice. If we were really diabolical, we’d force them to read this.

7 August 2005 @ 12:12PM >> The New York Post is reporting that New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is now investigating why Air America ended up with $875,000 in “loans” from a from a charity for underprivileged youth that was “almost entirely funded by government contracts and grants”:

“We are looking into it in consultation with the city’s Department of Investigation,” Spitzer spokesman Darren Dopp revealed.

The highly unusual loans to the left-wing radio network were made by the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club — which was visited by one of Spitzer’s investigators yesterday, officials said.

Until its downfall, Gloria Wise and an associated agency, Pathways for Youth, had grown into one of the largest social-service providers in The Bronx with an annual budget of $10 million.

[...]

All of its city contracts were yanked once the loan to Air America was uncovered.

Gloria Wise is now struggling to stay afloat with a reduced schedule of programs.

5 August 2005 @ 2:45PM >> Technorati, a weblog tracking service, recently reported that the number of blogs online doubles every five months. This led technology reporter Michael S. Malone to wonder whether blogs are subject to Moore’s Law.

What’s Moore’s Law?

Whenever you hear the word “doubling” related to anything high tech, the first thing that comes to mind is the Law of Laws in the digital world: Moore’s Law of Semiconductors. I probably don’t have to remind you of what it says: the performance of semiconductor devices doubles every two years.

Gordon Moore, one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley and a co-founder of both Fairchild and Intel, came up with this “law” in the mid-1960s while preparing for an industry speech. Basically, he tracked the capacity of all of his company’s memory chips up until that date ... and discovered, to his astonishment, that they made a straight line on a sheet of log paper. He then took a chance and predicted that this trajectory might be maintained for a few more years.

I saw Gordon make a follow-up presentation in the late 1970s. He was still amazed: the chart now included logic chips, memory chips and even microprocessors — and yet the semiconductor world was still clicking along at this mind-boggling pace, doubling performance every 18-24 months. And it worked along multiple axes: hold performance constant, and chip prices halved every couple years. Hold those two variables steady and chips got smaller at the same rate.

Malone cites former Intel CEO Andy Grove, who argued that industries can achieve faster advancement as they adopt more technology:

[W]henever you could find something that could be managed by digital systems — not an automobile but an engine computer, not a doctor but patient diagnostic and monitoring equipment, not a chromosome but gene mapping — it was like strapping that industry to a comet. Almost overnight the rate of change literally became exponential, improvements asymptotic, and miracles began to occur.

So, will Moore’s Law affect online media like blogs? Malone seems to think so:

That’s why we in the tech industry have become very attuned to the doubling curve. Whenever and wherever it pops up, we pay a lot of attention. And now, here it is, not surprisingly, characterizing the blogosphere. After all, the world of blogs has gotten a lot of early-PC and early dot.com attention over the last year, becoming one of those hot terms that everyone is using, and the tech playground towards which all of the usual early adapters have raced. It has also had some big early victories (pulling down Dan Rather, stealing readers from newspapers and television, setting much of the debate in the last presidential election), and it is beginning to show some of the early signs of consolidation (TechCentral Station, Pajama Media), the creation of larger and better-funded enterprises (Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere), industry organizations and conferences, and a growing support infrastructure (from search engines like Technorati, to free blogging services from the likes of AOL and MSN).

[...]

All of this suggests that the blogosphere is, like those other industries and professions under the regime of Moore’s Law, ripe for investment, for miracles and for the creation of great fortunes. When? There’s the real question. The PC industry ran for a long time under Moore’s Law before it finally found its destiny with the Apple II. Until then, a lot of very smart people devoted a lot of their lives and imaginations to personal computing with little in the bank to show for it.

5 August 2005 @ 2:24PM >> ScrappeFace “reports“:

Encouraged by their close loss in this week’s special election for a vacant House seat in Ohio, the Democrat National Committee (DNC) has mapped a 50-state “virtual victory” strategy for 2006 and 2008.

“It feels so good to almost win,” said DNC chairman Howard Dean. “We now believe we can rally our base around the hope of down-to-the-wire losses in traditionally Republican districts coast-to-coast.”

4 August 2005 @ 6:45PM >> Over a week ago, I noted that liberal radio network Air America was under investigation. It looks like Air America was on the receiving end of potentially several hundred thousand dollars taken out of a charity for underprivileged children. Just the sort of thing you’d expect, say, The New York Times to cover, right? After all, the Times gave lots of ink—also known as free publicity—to the network when it was in its infancy. The paper even plugged a possible Senate candidacy for former funnyman Al Franken, the flagship host on Air America. Considering that the scandal centers on the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx—right in the backyard of Times-land—it seems tailor made for coverage in the nation’s self-proclaimed “newspaper of record.”

But, of course, the establishment media these days is so predictable in how bias shows itself that we all know the Times hasn’t covered the story, and probably won’t unless and until there’s a tidbit of information that casts Air America in a good light.

Michelle Malkin, who has been covering this story extensively, is keeping score in her latest update:

Number of NY Times articles mentioning Air America since March 2004: 59

Number of NY Times articles mentioning the Air Enron scandal: 0

Meanwhile, John Hinderaker of PowerLine takes note of what the Times is covering these days:

In today’s paper, for example, the Times covers a much more boring controversy in which Westchester County’s District Attorney is being pressed to reimburse the county for the expense of after-hours security. The story is a yawner. The DA has a legitimate argument that she needs 24-hour security because of her job; there are no falsified reports or conflicting stories; no one is stealing money from poor children or Alzheimer’s victims; and no one is funding a controversial political and commercial enterprise. Yet the Times finds the story newsworthy, while ignoring Air Enron, which is also taking place in its own back yard. Why? Well, maybe because it’s because the Westchester DA is a Republican, Jeanine Pirro, who is interested in higher office. Or maybe it’s because no hard work—like actually carrying out an investigation—was necessary; all the Times had to do was quote Democratic Party spokesmen.

Or maybe both.

The Times is getting criticized because this is the sort of story that they should be covering, and most certainly would if the hosts on Air America had political views that occupied the other side of the political spectrum.

Investor’s Business Daily argues:

[M]oney intended for poor minority children and Alzheimer’s victims was instead used to make sure the financially tanking and ratings-troubled Air America could keep blathering.

Public funds used to prop up a business! Just the kind of scandal that left-leaning media would die for. Yet for some reason they’re giving this one a pass.

Is it because there are no mean ol’ conservatives to blame?

When [Rush] Limbaugh’s problems with painkillers came to light, the mainstream media could hardly contain themselves. They called him a “pill popper” and hypocrite and cheered for release of his medical records. And when he returned to the air, they couldn’t talk enough about his stay in rehab.

Al Franken, Air America’s featured host, seized the moment and labeled Limbaugh a “drug addict” — after calling him a “Big Fat Idiot” in the title of his book years before.

Nothing wrong, mind you, with reporting on Limbaugh’s woes. Nothing, that is, as long as the media cover flaws of those on the left with equal enthusiasm.

On an increasingly frequent basis, the establishment media unwittingly reveals itself as a champion of a particular ideology, not the dispassionate conveyor of information that they claim to be. At the same time, TV news networks and major newspapers continue to lose audience. Part of that is due to the fact that the Internet has made their distribution channels redundant. Another reason might be that their product has become boring. These days, it is quite easy to predict what stories the Times will report and what spin their coverage will contain. If I can predict what I’ll read in tomorrow’s Times long before the printing presses finish their daily run, why bother paying for the paper?

3 August 2005 @ 7:14PM >> Tomorrow evening, I’ll be a guest on “It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle“, which runs on Comcast cable’s CN8 news network. We’ll be discussing Ed Klein’s book about Hillary Clinton.

If you are a Comcast customer living in the northeast and want to watch, tune to channel 8 from 9:00PM - 10:00PM ET.

3 August 2005 @ 2:43PM >> Albert Eisele, the editor of The Hill, “The Newspaper for and about U.S. Congress,” recently made an enemy out of the veteran White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, by publishing this quote of hers:

The day I say Dick Cheney is going to run for president, I’ll kill myself. All we need is one more liar.

Apparently, Thomas’s statement prompted some people to send her some nasty e-mail, which Eisele laments in his latest column:

Anyway, having unintentionally caused Ms. Thomas considerable pain, I wish to rise to her defense. Thomas is a great journalist, the first lady of the White House press corps, who has blazed a trail for women journalists and has been doing for decades what White House reporters are supposed to do but too often don’t, which is to ask tough questions of presidents.

It was Helen Thomas’s extreme imagery that made her quote newsworthy. But she also tipped her ideological hand by parroting the rhetoric of the hard-left. And it is interesting to note that Eisele—and the entire Washington establishment press, it appears—didn’t think to ask whether Thomas’s statement revealed anything about her biases and the possibility that those biases could have ever colored her reporting during her long career.

Is it possible that a vast majority of the Washington press corps agrees with the assumptions on which Thomas based her comment?