31 October 2005 >> South Park Conservatives author Brian C. Anderson, also of City Journal and the Manhattan Institute, notices that the left’s monopoly on Hollywood is beginning to crack.

Speaking of which, Ryan Zempel of TownHall.com has a three-part series [1, 2, 3] covering the recent Liberty Film Festival.

30 October 2005 @ 2:03PM >> Early last year, I wrote about my battle with spam e-mails. Now say hello to splogs (”spam blogs”), the latest way for spammers to annoy you and degrade the utility of the internet:

At first glance, it seems like a regular blog. But look closer and you’ll see there’s something very odd about the blog’s content: It’s very familiar. Too familiar.

That’s because you wrote it, six months ago, on your own blog. The rest of the content doesn’t make sense: The same word repeated over and over again. There are ads all over the sidebar for products like Viagra and mortgage loans.

This, you realize, is a splog, and you’re the victim.

“Splogs,” or spam blogs, are the latest way for spammers to manipulate the blogosphere for profit. The phenomenon hit an all-time high recently, when Google’s blog-hosting service, Blogger, was inundated with more than 13,000 fake blogs spawned by a script (all have since been taken down).

[...]

While splogs may seem like a minor annoyance to the individual blogger, the overall effect of splogs is far-reaching. “What happens when all the search terms become infested with these splogs?” said Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome. “It makes it that much harder to find the stuff you really want to look for.”

29 October 2005 @ 4:17PM >> Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Chief of Staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, has been indicted for making false statements to authorities investigating the Valerie Plame leak. That’s a serious charge, and if true, Libby deserves to face the consequences. He has already resigned.

While this is serious news for Libby, the investigation has yet to yield the political bonanza that opponents of the Bush Administration had hoped. The Plank, an interesting new blog from the center-left magazine The New Republic, summarizes:

[T]he way Democrats were talking about this case leading up to the indictment, this has to come as a letdown. After all, liberals believed that Patrick Fitzgerald was going to cripple the Bush administration and reveal the lies and deceptions behind the Iraq war. There was speculation that Fitzgerald would shine a bright, unflattering light onto the inner workings of the White House Iraq Group. There was talk that he was going to name a “Constitutional officer”—namely Cheney—as an unindicted co-conspirator. And there were rumors that he was seeking to empanel a second grand jury to investigate who ginned up the fake “Niger documents.”

Maybe Fitzgerald just has a very impressive poker face, but it sure seemed from his press conference that none of those things is now going to happen. Even the talk, earlier in the day, that Rove was now in an excruciating legal limbo seems like it was overblown. The five indictments against Libby appear to be the only indictments Fitzgerald is going to bring. It seems there’s a good chance Rove is off the hook and an even better chance that everyone else is, as well.

We’ll see. I’ve refrained from speculating much on this case because it seems like a good way to guarantee that I’ll be proven wrong in the future.

It is interesting to note that nobody has (yet) been indicted in the original leak. We still don’t know who told columnist Robert Novak that CIA operative Valerie Plame was Joe Wilson’s wife. If the investigation concludes with no indictments for the leak itself, Libby would find himself facing prison for covering up something that wasn’t a crime in the first place.

28 October 2005 @ 3:49PM >> Last night, my girlfriend Jill took me on a terrific dinner cruise around Manhattan for my birthday. After a tasty butternut squash soup, a garlic-topped filet mignon, sufficient quantities of Syrah and Cabernet, and an embarrassing attempt at dancing, we stepped off the boat at Pier 81 and clutched our winter coats on what was one of the first certifiably cold evenings of the season.

We noticed almost immediately a strangely strong syrupy smell. The smell was so pervasive that it seemed like it must have been on our clothes, and the fact that we noticed it right after visiting the coat check made me think there was some sort of waffle mishap in the nearby kitchen. The smell followed us around for several blocks as we walked, and while we couldn’t locate the source, its strength made it unlikely that it was more than a few inches from our respective noses.

By the time we returned home, it had dissipated somewhat, but we were perplexed that we never figured out the source. I’m a pretty clumsy eater, and on more than one occasion, I’ve left breakfast with a dollop of syrup clinging somewhere to my clothing. I know that smell. This was far beyond that, as if I’d laundered my clothes with Aunt Jemima instead of Tide.

Apparently, we weren’t the only ones who noticed that smell. This morning, I saw a headline on Drudge Report that said, “Strong, sweet smell reported in Manhattan.” The link brought me to this AP report:

Residents from the southern tip of Manhattan to the Upper West Side nearly 10 miles north called a city hot line to report a strong odor Thursday night that most compared to maple syrup, The New York Times reported Friday.

There were so many calls that the city’s Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to find the source of the mysterious smell.

[...]

“It’s like maple syrup. With Eggos (waffles). Or pancakes,” Arturo Padilla told The Times as he walked in Lower Manhattan. “It’s pleasant.”

New York City’s cable news channel NY1 has also been reporting the story, but the mystery remains. So what was that sweet smell? If anybody knows, they’re not saying. But one interesting theory is that it’s a test of how fumes disperse in the city. If that’s the case, then I hope it’s our government conducting the test, and it’s not a dry run for something more sinister.

27 October 2005 @ 9:36AM >> Last year, the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918. This year, the White Sox won for the first time since 1917.

From this Yankees fan’s perspective, the best thing about the White Sox winning this year is that they’re not the Red Sox. Congratulations, Chicago!

27 October 2005 @ 9:31AM >> Victory. I suspect President Bush’s next nominee will be far more palatable to the people who voted for him. At least now there’s that possibility.

25 October 2005 >> Some British banks are apparently banning piggy banks because Muslims may find them offensive. No word yet on when these banks plan on firing all their Jewish employees.

23 October 2005 >> I am very honored to announce that Brainwashing 201: The Second Semester was selected as the Best Short Film of 2005 by the jurors of the Liberty Film Festival. This year, Liberty awarded prizes for submitted films in only two categories, Best Short and Best Feature, so it was quite flattering to have been selected.

Although there are no plans to release Brainwashing 201 as a stand-alone film, much of the material will be included in the upcoming feature-length film Indoctrinate U, which we hope to complete in early 2006.

22 October 2005 >> Last night, my new short film Brainwashing 201: The Second Semester was shown at the Liberty Film Festival in LA. The film was introduced by academic freedom fighter David Horowitz, whose speech was interrupted by two protesters who ran on stage screaming, “Fascists have no right to speak.” The irony of that statement from the people trying to shut Horowitz up seemed to be lost on the protesters, but it served as a perfect illustration of the intellectual thuggery covered in the film that followed. The protesters were quickly whisked off stage and out of the theater in a fashion that was far more gentle than they deserved.

The audience seemed to enjoy the film quite well, which was rather gratifying, as were the kind compliments from the viewers who greeted me after the screening. I also got to meet a number of Brain Terminal readers for the first time, some of whom I’ve been in touch with by e-mail or recognized from the discussion board. I was glad to have gotten a chance to put faces with the names I’ve gotten to know over the last few years.

After Brainwashing 201 was screened came Dead Meat, a documentary on the Canadian health care system by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg, the executive producers of the Brainwashing series and my partners in On The Fence Films.

This morning, Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution was shown, and unlike last year when I slept through a morning screening of one of my shorts, I managed to drag my butt out of bed and fill my stomach with enough coffee to make it to the theater in time.

20 October 2005 @ 8:06AM >> Did President Bush pick Harriet Miers for all the wrong reasons? The White House has been quietly touting Miers’s religious background for the apparent purpose of signaling her position on the abortion debate. But if that’s the sole reason she was chosen, then her Supreme Court nomination might be even worse than I originally feared.

Abortion-rights advocates argue in favor of Roe v. Wade, not because it was based on sound judicial reasoning, but because it resulted in an outcome they favor. If Miers would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade because of personal beliefs—as opposed to reasons of law—then she might be casting a sensible legal vote, but she would be doing so for all the wrong reasons.

Conservatives tend to favor justices whose philosophy is to interpret the Constitution as written, not as they would like it to be personally or as Europeans might want. Conservatives recognize that this philosophy would restrict the unlimited growth of government and would preserve individual rights in the way that the Founders intended. In my mind, having the correct judicial philosophy is far more important than casting one or two votes any particular direction, especially when those votes are cast for political reasons.

Despite what the abortion debaters say, overturning Roe v. Wade would have a relatively limited effect. In many states, abortion would still be legal, in some, it would be more restricted, and in a few, it could be outlawed. Sure, a post-Roe world would be different, but it wouldn’t be so vastly different that anti-abortion conservatives should sell out all their other beliefs to secure it.

I’ve got a bad feeling about Miers. If she gets on the court, she could be issuing decisions decades from now that would make Constitutional conservatives cringle. Long after George W. Bush has left the White House, conservatives could be cursing his name. Is President Bush willing to risk leaving that legacy by putting Miers on the Supreme Court? We already know the answer, and this is one of those instances where the president’s legendary steadfastness runs the risk of driving a permanent wedge between himself and many of the people who voted for him. Luckily for President Bush, he doesn’t have to run again.

19 October 2005 @ 3:33PM >> A perfect example of how the establishment media manufactures the news:

If Michelle Kosinski’s canoe had sprung a leak on NBC’s “Today” show Friday, she didn’t have much to worry about.

In one of television’s inadvertently funny moments, the NBC News correspondent was paddling in a canoe during a live report about flooding in Wayne, N.J. While she talked, two men walked between her and the camera - making it apparent that the water where she was floating was barely ankle-deep.

Sure, this might be a little amusing, but it was less so during the Hurricane Katrina hype, much of which turned out to be phony as well. Not only is it likely that some New Orleans residents failed to evacuate due to the over-hyping of previous storms—notice how every winter blizzard in the Northeast is dramatically dubbed “The Storm of the Century”?—but the false reports of mass rapes, roving armed gangs, and snipers shooting at helicopters kept frightened relief workers out of the city.

How many people died by staying in New Orleans because earlier hurricane hype led them to disregard the pre-landfall Katrina reporting? How many people died because over-the-top reporting in the days following Katrina hindered the relief effort?

The media dedicated much of its post-Katrina reporting to hand-wringing over governmental failures in the response to the crisis, but they should also look at themselves and examine how much of that crisis they caused.

14 October 2005 >> While reading this report on the Valerie Plame leak investigation, I noticed this sentence:

The case dates back to July 2003, when a conservative commentator with close ties to the Republican party, Robert Novak, published Plame’s name.

The presumably objective (and therefore unbiased) reporter notes that Robert Novak is “a conservative commentator with close ties to the Republican party.” Both of those statements are undoubtedly true, and therefore there’s nothing wrong with reporting them.

Still, it made me strain to remember the last time I read similar reporting applied to the other side. I can’t ever remember reading a mainstream press report that referred to any particular journalist as “a liberal commentator with close ties to the Democratic party.”

George Stephanopoulos, the former Clinton spinmeister, now hosts ABC’s flagship This Week, sitting in the same chair that the stately David Brinkley once occupied. And Meet The Press, the titan of Sunday morning news, is hosted by Tim Russert, a former aide to liberal New York Democrat and former Governor Mario Cuomo. Yet when the names Stephanopoulos or Russert pop up in reporting, somehow they’re never labeled as what they are the way Novak is.

It’s not evidence of bias to say that Robert Novak is a conservative with Republican ties, because that information is accurate. But if the exact same descriptive data is withheld when covering liberal journalists, then bias is apparent in the omission of that information.

Labeling Novak, however true the label might be, seems like an attempt to question his journalistic integrity. But if it’s fair to ask whether Novak’s political ties affect his work, shouldn’t we ask that of all reporters, liberals included?

Pay attention to when descriptive labels are used in media reporting. You’ll discover a subtle way in which reporters insert their personal perspectives into their work.

12 October 2005 @ 11:01AM >> A letter from Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq was intercepted by American forces this summer. Yesterday, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence released the letter, which provides a window into the strategic thinking of al Qaeda’s leadership.

American Future has dissected the letter and notes that not all is well for al Qaeda or for the effort to stop the march of democracy in Iraq.

One interesting tidbit in the letter is the degree to which al Qaeda depends on the media for its own success. Zarqawi says “more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media” and holds out hope that “[t]hings may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam—and how they ran and left their agents—is noteworthy.”

In other words, Zarqawi hopes that the media will sway enough Americans against the war, leading to a Vietnam-like pull-out and a huge power vacuum (and opportunity for al Qaeda) in Iraq.

As if on cue, The New York Times spins the Zarqawi letter thusly:

In [the letter], Mr. Zawahiri told Mr. Zarqawi that the American occupation of Iraq had provided Islamic militants with a historic opportunity to win popular support.

Actually, the letter seems quite the opposite: al Qaeda’s global leadership has had its lines of communication severed and is in desperate need of money, and Zarqawi’s constant killings of Muslims in Iraq are turning the Iraqi people away from al Qaeda. Leave it to The New York Times to report this as “a historic opportunity to win popular support.” Yeah, and having your car stolen is a great opportunity to get a new car.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine takes a closer look at the letter and the Times’s mis-reporting of it.

11 October 2005 @ 10:31AM >> At the Liberty Film Festival in Los Angeles later this month, On The Fence Films will be premiering our new short film—Brainwashing 201: The Second Semester—on opening night (Friday, October 21st).

This film, an interim release before our feature-length Indoctrinate U is complete, contains new footage chronicling more outrages within higher education. People with high blood pressure or heart problems may wish to consult a physician prior to viewing.

Note that we do not currently plan on releasing Brainwashing 201 online, so the Liberty Film Festival may be your only chance to see it.

Liberty will also be screening my short video Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution.

11 October 2005 @ 10:07AM >> In the wake of the recent suicide bombing at the University of Oklahoma, explosive devices were found at two more schools recently: UCLA on Friday and Georgia Tech yesterday.

There is no evidence yet suggesting a connection between these incidents. Let’s hope it is not part of a larger pattern.

9 October 2005 @ 4:27PM >> Last month, I noted a report that the Danish government pays for prostitutes to have sex with disabled citizens. Well, that’s not quite enough for Torben Hansen, whose limited mobility means that his sexual servants must make house-calls. But that also means that he faces higher hooker bills than if could get to a brothel himself, and those extra fees are apparently not covered by the Danish government.

According to the BBC, Hansen “believes his local authority should pay the extra charge he incurs when he hires a sex worker”:

“I want them to cover the extra expenses for the prostitutes to get here, because it’s a lot more expensive getting them to come to my home rather than me going to a brothel,” Mr Hansen told BBC World Service’s Outlook programme.

“It’s a necessity for me. I can’t move very well, and it’s impossible for me to go there.”

[...]

“It’s unfair to deny people with disabilities the right to a sex life,” he added.

Hey, isn’t it unfair to deny anyone the right to a sex life? If so, then we have an interesting new opportunity for personal injury lawsuits. Get turned down by a pretty girl at a bar? Sue her! She stifled your right to a sex life!

I wish I’d thought of this years ago...

8 October 2005 @ 5:25PM >> Is the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court the biggest political misstep of the Bush presidency? After assessing the mood of the guests at the White House’s dinner for the 50th Anniversary of National Review magazine, James Taranto believes he sees “a political disaster in the making.”

We talked to quite a few people, and we heard not a single kind word about the nomination from anyone who wasn’t on the White House staff. A couple of our soundings led us to think that such support as it has received has been more sycophantic than sincere. One putative proponent privately distanced himself from his public praise of Miers. Another person, whose employer has strongly backed the Miers nomination, told us, “Of course, I disagree wholeheartedly.”

[...]

Conventional wisdom still has it that Miers is a shoo-in for confirmation. We’re not so sure. From what we saw last night, the right is furious at President Bush for appointing someone they see as manifestly underqualified and for ducking a fight with the Democratic left—a fight that, in their view (and ours), would be good for the country, the conservative cause and the Republican Party.

Charles Krauthammer zeroes in on the problem:

When in 1962 Edward Moore Kennedy ran for his brother’s seat in the Senate, his opponent famously said that if Kennedy’s name had been Edward Moore, his candidacy would have been a joke. If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her.

[N]ominating a constitutional tabula rasa to sit on what is America’s constitutional court is an exercise of regal authority with the arbitrariness of a king giving his favorite general a particularly plush dukedom. [...]

It is particularly dismaying that this act should have been perpetrated by the conservative party. For half a century, liberals have corrupted the courts by turning them into an instrument of radical social change on questions — school prayer, abortion, busing, the death penalty — that properly belong to the elected branches of government. Conservatives have opposed this arrogation of the legislative role and called for restoration of the purely interpretive role of the court. To nominate someone whose adult life reveals no record of even participation in debates about constitutional interpretation is an insult to the institution and to that vision of the institution.

Absolutely. The best conservative argument for the philosophy of the court is that the Constitution should be interpreted as written, not through some sort of deconstructionist psychic reading of what the Founders might or might not want if they were alive today and informed by supposedly enlightened European jurisprudence. If there is no public record whatsoever of where Miers stands on this debate, I wonder whether she has any underlying philosophy at all. Maybe I just naturally recoil when a President Bush puts forth an unknown quantity for the Supreme Court. The Harriet Miers nomination was a disaster the first time when it went by the name David Souter.

“A disaster on every level” is also what Robert Bork—nominated for the Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1987—said of the Miers nomination. He added:

It’s a little late to develop a constitutional philosophy or begin to work it out when you’re on the court already. It’s kind of a slap in the face to the conservatives who’ve been building up a conservative legal movement for the last 20 years.

Just as there’s a reason the judiciary shouldn’t assume the role of the legislature, there’s also a reason the judicial branch is supposed to be separate from the executive. When President Bush tries to put someone on the court whose only real qualification seems to be her proximity to him, he is neglecting the core principle that defines conservative court philosophy, and he is sinking to the very sort of behavior that conservatives have been decrying for years: using the court as a political tool. By putting forth Harriet Miers, President Bush is almost daring principled conservatives to oppose her, because if we didn’t, we’d be hypocrites.

President Bush places a high value on personal loyalty, and for that reason, he’s unlikely to withdraw the nomination of Harriet Miers. Well, I pledge my loyalty not to a particular leader or party, but to a set of ideas. And those ideas require me to oppose Harriet Miers because she is simply too close to the president and because there don’t seem to be any other arguments in her favor.

I hope there are still enough principled leaders in the Senate to give this nomination the kind of scrutiny it deserves. As Democrats are often fond of reminding Republican presidents, the Senate is under no obligation to rubber-stamp any of the president’s judicial nominations. Republican Senators should remember that as well.

8 October 2005 @ 2:53PM >> With life as hectic as it is these days, it’s sometimes difficult to find the time to sit down and write your own witty protest sign slogans. That’s why the good folks at The People’s Cube created the Progressive Truth Generator. Plug in the name of your favorite right-wing oppressor (or request a generic denunciation), and out spits a scathing condemnation of your target complete with all the necessary buzzwords.

I tried it myself:

Evan, you are a cold-hearted racist because you think the Founding Fathers contributed something positive to humankind!

Pretty accurate.

6 October 2005 @ 11:51AM >> Bucknell University President Brian Mitchell released a statement in the wake of the recent “hunting terrorists” controversy. More >>

6 October 2005 @ 11:39AM >> If a suicide bomber struck outside a stadium packed with 84,000 people smack dab in the middle of America’s heartland, you’d think you might hear about it. That’s exactly what happened outside a University of Oklahoma football game last Saturday.

Just days before he blew himself up, Joel Henry Hinrichs III tried unsuccessfully to buy large quantities of ammonium nitrate, the main ingredient used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. Instead, Hinrichs used TATP, the same explosive used by the recent London bombers and failed “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. TATP is highly unstable and can explode spontaneously, raising the possibility that Hinrichs’s bomb detonated before he had intended. Other evidence also suggests that Hinrichs had more ambitious plans:

Officials confirmed Sunday a cache of explosive material later was found inside Hinrichs’ residence at the university-owned Parkview Apartments [...]

Meanwhile, an Oklahoma television station is reporting that Hinrichs attended the same mosque in Norman, Oklahoma as Zacarias Moussaoui, who was convicted of conspiracy in connection with the September 11th, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

The FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force are investigating [PDF file; 181KB].

3 October 2005 @ 12:43PM >> In The Washington Post, Howard Kurtz quotes his colleague Marie Arana, who describes what life is like working for that newspaper:

The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions. . . . We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I’ve been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats.

1 October 2005 @ 3:24PM >> I’ve gotten reports from a large number of people who have been expressing their displeasure with a Bucknell administrator who called three students into her office to discuss the inappropriateness of the phrase “hunting terrorists.” Some of these people have e-mailed various school administrators, and the university’s responses are beginning to trickle in. More >>

1 October 2005 @ 1:30PM >> Once again, the American media have kept their focus away from a devastating human tragedy of incomprehensible proportions simply because there’s no clean way to affix political blame. This underreported story is over a week old, and only now are people starting to notice. We as a nation should be outraged, and we must demand answers. More >>