A reader sent in this hilarious link to the latest conservative culinary fad, W Ketchup :

You don?t support Democrats. Why should your ketchup?

W Ketchup? is made in America, from ingredients grown in the USA.

The leading competitor not only has 57 varieties, but has 57 foreign factories as well. W Ketchup comes in one flavor: American.

Does buying ketchup help the Democrats? Is John Kerry responsible for outsourcing? TruthOrFiction.com has the answers :

First, the Heinz company has issued a statement clarifying that neither Teresa Heinz Kerry nor Senator Kerry has any involvement in the management or the board of the business.

It also says that neither Teresa Kerry nor any of the Heinz endowments or trusts holds any significant percentage of of shares of the company and that their holdings are less than four percent.

In other words, no controlling interest.

The statement also says that sixty percent of the sales of the company are overseas and that the foreign plants allow them to serve local customers with fresher ingredients.

In other words, their foreign operations are for the purpose of doing business on foreign land, which is not the same, for example, as an American factory firing its workers and having the same work done in another country by cheaper labor.

Teresa Heinz Kerry was married to the late Senator John Heinz III, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

He was killed in an aircraft accident in 1991, leaving his portion of the family fortune to his wife, estimated to be $500 million.

Probably just as deceptive as the “America?s Ketchup?” crap is the label itself. By placing a picture of George Washington on the bottle, they’re trying to create the impression that the “W” stands for “Washington” (as opposed to a reference to this dumbass). If that’s the case, would the father of our country appreciate being made the mascot of a partisan condiment? looking at his 1796 farewell address, I doubt it.

Washington, like many of his contemporaries, did not understand or believe in political parties, and saw them as fractious agencies subversive of domestic tranquility. When political parties began forming during his administration, and in direct response to some of his policies, he failed to comprehend that parties would be the chief device through which the American people would debate and resolve major public issues. It was his fear of what parties would do to the nation that led Washington to draft his Farewell Address.

The two parties that developed in the early 1790s were the Federalists, who supported the economic and foreign policies of the Washington administration, and the Jeffersonian Republicans, who in large measure opposed them. The Federalists backed Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s plan for a central bank and a tariff and tax policy that would promote domestic manufacturing; the Jeffersonians opposed the strong government inherent in the Hamiltonian plan, and favored farmers as opposed to manufacturers. In foreign affairs, both sides wanted the United States to remain neutral in the growing controversies between Great Britain and France, but the Federalists favored the English and the Jeffersonians the French. The Address derived at least in part from Washington’s fear that party factionalism would drag the United States into this fray.

And speaking of conservative food, remember Star Spangled Ice Cream? They’re the right-wing answer to Ben and Jerry’s who had their fifteen minutes of fame last year when they introduced flavors like “Choc & Awe” and “I Hate The French Vanilla”. Well, they’re about to release a new flavor : GuantanaMocha. Don’t get me wrong, mocha is probably my favorite ice cream flavor, but do conservatives really like being reminded of rape and torture while they eat their dessert?

Thanks to my girlfriend for pointing me in the direction of last night’s interview between Larry King and Ron Reagan Jr. :

KING: Your mother came out — I was the master of ceremonies that night at that dinner where they honored her at the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. Wasn’t too long, maybe two months ago, less maybe. She came out that night and strongly supported stem cell research, embryonic stem cell research. Everyone supports adult stem cell research. Where do you stand? What do you make of it?

REAGAN: I stand shoulder to shoulder with my mother on that. It’s astonishing to me that we are even having the conversation about this. We’re not talking about fetuses, human beings being killed, we’re talking about collections of cells in a petri dish that are never, ever going to be a human being. This could be the biggest revolution in medicine ever, well, ever really. Bigger than antibiotics. Bigger than anything.

And you know what strikes me, too, is that you cannot be against embryonic stem cell research and be intellectually and therefore morally consistent, if you’re not also against in vitro fertilization. Because the same thing results in in vitro fertilization. Thousands of blastocysts collections are discarded. Now you’ll notice that most of the politicians who are against embryonic stem cell research don’t say anything about in vitro fertilization. You might wonder why. Well, it’s because what are they going to do, come out against people who want to get pregnant? That’s a political non-starter so they’re going not going to — they are just going to shut up about that and go after stem cell research instead. They’re playing politics with it and it is shameful. It is shameful.
. . .
CALLER: I was just wondering if, Ron, are you going to take a more public stand now with stem cell research if your mother doesn’t come out so much in public, will you?

REAGAN: I may well. I may well. It’s a very important issue. Some people may not realize how important it is, but this is a huge, huge medical breakthrough.

KING: What do doctors and researchers tell you?

REAGAN: Doctors and researchers, as I said, can’t believe we’re still having this discussion. This is like not believing Darwinian evolution, or something, which many people in this administration also don’t believe in. You know, just by the by. It is so profoundly anti-intellectual and inhumane. I mean, we are talking about cells, undifferentiated cells, in petri dish. No fingers, no toes, no brain, no spinal cord, no feelings, no pain, no nothing. These are just cells. And we’re talking about the potential to save real, living human beings. Children with diabetes, for instance.

KING: The feeling is it will lead to this kind of research using the embryonic stem cells, will quickly bring about, will speed up…

REAGAN: Here’s the potential for this. Imagine 10 years from now, you have — something goes wrong with you. You can extract cells from your own body, create embryonic stem cells with those cells, and then reinject those stem cells that are now genetic match to you, so there’s no, you know, fussing around with rejection or tissue rejection or anything nothing like that, and repair an internal organ. Repair your heart from the inside out using your own cells. You know, stem cells generated from your own body.

KING: So you can take the Alzheimer’s.

REAGAN: Hopefully. Hopefully.

KING: And replace it.

REAGAN: That’s possible. Alzheimer’s, ironically, may not be the best test case for this sort thing. Heart disease, diabetes, may be better. The brain is such a complex thing. The mechanism of Alzheimer’s may not lend itself to embryonic stem cell research. It may, we don’t know that.

KING: Muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis.

REAGAN: Parkinson’s. The list of things that could be helped by this just goes on and on. And that we are playing politics with this, I’ll say it again, is shameful.

The title of this post points to the only reason I can think of to explain the conservative position that a bunch of cells in a petri dish are equivalent to a human life. Now I know right-wingers have been blurring the lines between life and potential life for a while now, but it’s starting to get pretty goddamned ridiculous. What’s next? Accusing guys who practice the “pull out method” of being murderers? Holding funerals for all the eggs killed during a menstrual cycle?

I’m willing to accept that there are people who are really militantly anti-abortion. That’s fine. We can argue until the end of time about just when Jesus uses his magic wand to give the sperm and egg a “soul” (I vote for never), but until a fertilized egg is implanted in a woman’s uterus, there isn’t gonna be a fucking baby. That’s not a political opinion, it’s the birds and bees.

Here’s a typical story you’ll see on the campaign trail :

President Bush’s re-election campaign, seizing on good economic news, unveiled a television commercial Friday that emphasizes job growth and criticizes senate rival John Kerry as a pessimist.

“After recession, 9-11 and war, now our economy has been growing for 10 straight months,” the ad says. “John Kerry’s response? He’s talking about the Great Depression. One thing’s sure: Pessimism never created a job.”
. . .
Bush’s new ad highlights the president’s own economic record, as the campaign works to promote an improving economy and shift the focus from Iraq.

Seizing on the fact that the economy is one of voters’ top issues, the ad claims that Bush enacted the “largest tax relief in history” and boasts that under his leadership there has been record homeownership, low inflation and low interest rates, and 1.4 million jobs created since August.

The 1.4 million figure was calculated based on Friday’s Labor Department announcement that U.S. employers added almost a quarter million workers in May. The department released the numbers at 8:30 a.m. The new ad was posted on the campaign’s Web site at 11 a.m.

But as Thomas Schaller explains over at the Gadflyer, those 1.4 million jobs aren’t exactly something to brag about :

That sounds nice, but here?s the catch: Because population growth requires the economy to produce about 150,000 jobs per month ? a point Kerry adviser Tad Devine tried to explain to Judy Woodruff on CNN today ? that means that the Administration must create more than 150,000 jobs each month outpace the expanding size of the employable national workforce, thereby creating net new jobs and lowering the unemployment rates.

Those rates are holding steady, which should raise flags in the media. For the innumerate scribes out there, the math is so simple you can do it without removing your shoes:

Because 9 x 150,000 is 1.35 million, and because subtracting this figure from 1.4 million yields the miniscule total of 50,000 jobs, the president?s policies during the past three quarters have created an average of fewer than 6,000 net new jobs per month during the past nine months above and beyond the jobs needed to meet an expanding employable population.

Let me touch on that second to last paragraph there. When you hear people praise Bush’s work on the economy, notice that they keep coming back to “jobs created”. There’s a good reason for that since the past few months have been really good for Bush on that front :

That’s a pretty dramatic spike up, especially if you consider that the number of jobs has been going down for almost all of Bush’s presidency. But one thing you don’t hear them talk about as much is the unemployment rate. The reason for this is that all this magical job creation hasn’t really done much to change the number of people out there looking for work :



As an aside, I included two different lines on the chart above to point out something that doesn’t get a lot of attention. While the unemployment rate is “officially” 5.6%, the method for calculating this number leaves out quite a few people. Here’s the explanation from the BLS :

U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)

U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers

NOTE: Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for a job. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

And if you think under-counting the number of unemployed and a stagnant unemployment rate relative to job growth are Bush’s only worries, let me point you to some posts by my fellow bloggers that shed even more light on how the economy is really doing.

Brad DeLong points out that the fruits of the economic recovery aren’t making a dent in the compensation gap. (via Kevin Drum)

As a share of the economy labor compensation has not been this low in almost 40 years (since 1966), and after-tax corporate profits are at the highest levels ever recorded by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Since its peak in 2001, as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), labor compensation has decreased by about 4 percent (from 67 to 63 percent) and corporate profits have increased by about 4 percent (from 8 to 12 percent) ? see chart below. After taxes, corporate profits reached 9.6 percent of GDP ? the highest level recorded dating back to 1947.

Billmon reminds us that wage growth is still lagging behind inflation, so even if you have a job, your dollars aren’t buying as much as they used to.

Nathan Newmann strengthens DeLong’s point by comparing the current recovery to previous ones. Unlike the last eight times we’ve had to pull ourselves out of an economic slump, this time we don’t have any major compensation or wage increases to look forward to.

The Center for American Progress pointed out in March that even with jobs being created, the quality of those jobs leave a lot to be desired :

According to government statistics “of 290,000 private-sector jobs created since April 2003, most – 215,000 – have been temporary positions.” Last month, employment in the private sector would have fallen “without the creation of 32,000 temporary jobs in the professional and business services sector.” Some economists think “that Mr. Bush’s tax incentives for business investment, which allow for 50% depreciation in the first year on most business equipment, may have temporarily helped tilt the balance in favor of spending on equipment instead of new permanent workers.”

Bush is fond of telling people that “pessimism never created a job”, but from where I’m sitting, optimism isn’t faring much better.

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up attending Unitarian-Universalist churches. One of the questions I’m often asked is “What kind of a church would an atheist go to?” Despite the fact that I haven’t regularly attended services in the last ten years, I usually feel the need to defend the church. Unfortunately, my explanations usually fall apart after “It’s possible to feel enlightened without being subservient to a diety…” I guess part of the reason is that while I understand the reason atheists would go to church, I’m not at all compelled to go myself.

As a way of helping explain things a bit better, I suggest reading this sermon by the former youth director of my church. Since the sermon is about how he went from atheist to believer, it only addresses the question posed above in a roundabout way. Nevertheless, it makes for a very interesting read, especially in comparison to the millions of stories out there about guys who “found salvation at the bottom of a bottle”. This bit in particular does a great job of describing my problems with the Christian God (for lack of a better term) :

Perhaps the reason I couldn’t abide the notion of God all those years was because it was someone else’s notion of God – and a dangerous, idolatrous notion at that.

The perverted picture of God that I so naturally recoiled against for much of my life goes way, way back. It began, so to speak, “in the beginning.” To my mind, it can be traced to one crucial verse in the Old Testament . . . and to the thinking that inspired that verse . . . as well as to the thinking that has since been engendered by that verse. My copy of Genesis, Chapter 1, verse 26, reads: “And God said, let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the earth.”

As debatable as the common translation of that passage is, I think most of us could agree that its two central ideas – the idea that God and human beings somehow uniquely resemble each other, and the idea that human beings should dominate the earth – these two ideas have shaped our culture for thousands of years, and continue to have enormous power over it, even today. This particular world-view can be implicated in most of the great tragedies of human history – wars and genocide, nationalism and racism, and the nuclear proliferation and environmental degradation that today threaten our very existence.

Such thinking, I believe, is precisely what we need salvation from; such thinking, in fact, is what made me an atheist for much of my life.

As this post winds down, lemme just share a sample exchange that I’ve had numerous times during conversations on this topic :

Christian : So if you’re not worshiping anything, why do you have to go to church?

Unitarian-Universalist : We’ll there’s a lot to be said for congregating with others who share your beliefs.

X-ian : So isn’t it just a club then?

UU : Well, no more than your church. After all, you can’t tell me you’re wearing your “Sunday best” to impress Jesus. He knows what you look like naked.

In the end, the idea of a church that doesn’t revolve around prayer is too hard a concept for most people to grasp.

This post at LeanLeft has me thinking. Once the right-wingers have finished parsing the hell out of the words “contacts” and “relationship” so they can prove a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that doesn’t exist, can we go ahead and apply the standard they come up with to the connection between George W. Bush and Ahmad Chalabi? Just curious, because it seems to me that the President and/or his staff feeding information to an Iranian spy is a pretty big deal.

Danile Drezner’s got a good post about the American Film Institute’s “100 Years…100 Songs” list. He lists a lot of worthy candidates missing from the official list that I agree with, but leaves off an important pick. Any list of great songs that doesn’t include “Big Bottom” by Spinal Tap isn’t worth your time.

Kerry’s silence on the VP issue is turning the press corps into stalkers :

Kerry has been in the Capitol infrequently this year as he pursues the presidency. But on this day, the man whose days are normally a frenzy of campaign activity spent hours chatting amiably with colleagues on the senate floor, giving fellow Democrats an overview of his campaign at a closed-door lunch and posing with 99 other senators for the formal portrait of the 108th Congress.

He got a high-five greeting from Sen. Barbara Boxer of California; a kiss from Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and a thumbs-up from Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. “Our next president is in there. He was fantastic,” Boxer said after attending the lunch.

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who rejected overtures that he join Kerry on a ticket that crossed party lines, walked by him on the senate floor at one point and leaned over to greet his fellow Vietnam War veteran. Kerry remained seated, the two men grasped hands and chatted briefly.
. . .
Edwards, a first-term North Carolina senator, was present on the senate floor for nearly the entire time in the morning that Kerry mingled, but the two men stayed in separate orbits.

They met a few hours later, when they repaired to a small room and closed the doors for a private word. The session did not appear on either man’s schedule and lasted only a few minutes.Aides to Kerry sought to minimize the political significance of the meeting. For his part, the Massachusetts senator appeared taken aback afterward when he realized photographers were waiting for the two men to leave the room. He spoke to senate aides, who then informed waiting photographers he did not wish to have his picture taken.

Whatever the significance of the meeting, Edwards has influential supporters in the jockeying that accompanies the selection of a running mate.

“After the meeting, Kerry had two cans of Diet Coke, read pages 24-38 of Clinton’s new memoir, and went to the bathroom. Although aides refuse to disclose whether the senate nominee went number one or number two, Kerry’s fondness for diet soda suggests that he had to pee-pee.”

Seriously though, I love that Kerry’s being so tight-lipped about his selection process. The buzz he’s creating about this whole process is great for the Kerry campaign, since every “Who’s he gonna pick?” story likely means that there’s one less “Kerry is a waffler” (how original). I saw drag this thing out as long as you can get away with it.

I wrote a month ago about Slate’s new Kerryisms feature. At the time, my biggest complaint wasn’t funny. In the month since that post, Slate has bent over backwards trying to find “caveats and curlicues” to the point that the column mostly consists of arbitrarily removing phrases from Kerry quotes. In the process, they often misrepresent what Kerry has said. For example :

Question: But no regrets about those votes [for NAFTA and the China trade agreement]?

Kerry: [1]Sure.

?senate presidential primary debate, Milwaukee, Feb. 15, 2004

[1] I regret the way that they haven’t been enforced,

Verbatim:

I regret the way that they haven’t been enforced, sure.

If you just read Slate’s version of the Kerry quote, you’d think that Kerry is agreeing with the “no regrets” statement when the full version of the quote makes the exact opposite point.

And this isn’t the only example, either. Last week, Spinsanity noted the following distortion :

Kerry’s original statement, from a February 9 broadcast of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” was the following:

I am the only United States Senator who has been elected four times, currently serving in the senate, who has voluntarily refused to ever take, in any of my races for the senate, one dime of political action committee special interest money. The only checks I took were from individual Americans. Now did some individual lobbyists contribute? The answer is, yes, they did.

Will Saletan, the author of “Kerryisms,” edited it into the following form (footnotes representing excised text appear in brackets):

I am the only United States Senator[1][2] who has voluntarily refused to ever take in any of my races[3] one dime of[4] special interest money. The only checks I took were from individual Americans.[5]

By removing “political action committee” with footnote 4 and the clarification about accepting donations from individual lobbyists in footnote 5, Saletan makes Kerry’s precise claim much less clear. But, more importantly, the removal of the text in footnotes 1-3 actually makes the statement untrue.

Also last week, Eugene Volokh noted yet another column twisting the facts as egregiously as the examples above and ended his post with this comment :

What exactly is the point of the Kerryisms? At first, I thought — based on the column’s introductory installment — the Kerryisms were meant to show that Kerry throws in lots of unnecessary verbiage. But here, this was a necessary proviso.

Another possibility is that “Kerryisms” has evolved into an attempt to show simply that Kerry uses a lot of qualifiers, instead of giving very simple answers. But often, as in this case, the right answer isn’t simple. It’s actually not terribly complex, but it’s not one-word simple. Is it really good to fault a politician for refusing to oversimplify? Should we want supposedly smart media outlets mocking politicians for trying to be precise?

The only other option that I see is that the column has descended into self-parody. (“Question: What’s the ratio of a circle’s circumference to the diameter? Kerry’s real answer: 3.1415926. Our answer, shorn of caveats and pointless embellishments: 3.”) But surely it can’t be intentional self-parody. So I ask again, what’s the point?

I think the point is that now we’re in an election year and Slate feels the need to balance out their coverage by providing Kerryisms to sit beside their regular Bushisms. The problem here is that Kerry’s speech isn’t as littered with “pointless embellishments” as the editors of Slate want to believe.

UPDATE : Via Digby, I see that William Saletan has posted an explanation of the Kerryisms column…sorta. His explanation is, to borrow a phrase, full of “caveats and curlicues” including this retarded analogy :

It’s like they ordered steak at a restaurant, and the waiter carved the meat off the bone, and they looked at the bone and accused the waiter of removing the meat. I’m the waiter, so I bear some blame.

Huh??

One of the funny things about living in Southern California is that you see cellphone towers all over the place disguised to look like palm trees. Apparently that’s not the only way cellphone companies hide their equipment (via BoingBoing):

European companies are finding ingenious ways to disguise ugly, but necessary, mobile phone antenna masts. Customers can pick everything from trees to crucifixes.
. . .
The latter crosses the line for some congregations, who are not willing to see Christ on a cross, with antennae sticking out here and there. The mayor of Schwabhausen, in deeply Catholic Bavaria, has come out against such an antenna in his village church. Mobile phone companies are hesitant as well.

“The churches actually don’t like it so much,” said Susanne Satzer-Spree, a Vodafone spokeswoman.

However, some houses of worship have managed to make their masts part of their identity.

“Everyone recognizes the church now,” said Johannes de Fallois, pastor at a church in Neuburg.

Would you go to a church with this on top?

Seriously, if anyone can track down a high quality version of this photo, I’ll be your best friend forever. I need a t-shirt with this on it.

Instapundit is a little confused by Bill Clinton’s new book :

THEY MAY BE STANDING IN LONG LINES for Bill Clinton’s book in New York, but when I visited my local mall just a few minutes after it opened this morning, the customers didn’t seem to be lining up for their copies.

Interestingly, there are still no reader reviews on the book’s Amazon page, though it does report that the book’s number one.

In case you’re a dumbass like Glenn, here’s the deal : the Amazon rank is based on sales and the reviews are based on reader reactions to the book. One happens before the book is read and the other happens after. Since the book was only released twelve hours ago and the book is 900 pages long, isn’t it a little early to be expecting Amazon reviews to be showing up? I’m sure that Glenn knows this, but he’d never let that get in the way of a cheap shot at the Clintons and/or the liberal media.

You know Bush’s “full sovereignty” malarkey isn’t working when the press starts using quotation marks in their headlines :

U.S. to Give ‘Legal’ Custody of Saddam to Iraqis

The United States plans to turn over legal, but not physical, custody of Saddam Hussein and some other prisoners to the Iraqi interim government soon after it takes over on June 30, a senior official said on Tuesday.
. . .
“Because the Iraqi interim government is not currently in a position to safeguard these detainees, at least in large numbers, our current plan calls for the transfer of legal responsibility over a certain number of high-profile detainees…while physical custody will remain with the multinational force in Iraq,” he told reporters.

Maybe it would be easier to report on the Iraqi handover by listing the rights that the Iraqis will have, rather than the endless stream of stories about various rights that are being chipped away by the Americans in charge over there.

There’s been plenty written about the blurring of the lines between entertainment and news, but the standard story only covers half of the picture. While news outlets move closer and closer to the hellish infotainment depicted in Network (if you haven’t seen it lately, rent it!), the flip side of this is that some entertainment shows are now filling in the void left by the news networks. Here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about from an interview with Stephen Hayes from last night’s episode of The Daily Show :

Stewart : It seems like Bush has started a new doctrine, the Bush Doctrine…[which] sets the standard for preemption. Now the first time you exercise a new doctrine, wouldn’t you want to be very sure of yourself because that will set a standard, no?

Hayes : I think the idea behind the Bush doctrine is that if you support or harbor terrorists, we’re gonna come after you. We’ll consider you a hostile regime. I don’t think that frankly in the aftermath of September 11th, I really don’t think that’s an unreasonable doctrine.

Stewart : Here’s the problem. It’s not unreasonable, but it’s not he point. The point is…I’ll list you four things : developing weapons of mass destruction, inflammatory rhetoric against the United States, supporting and harboring terrorism, and oppression of their own people. Now here’s the problem with your doctrine. You can’t tell me what country I just named. And that’s a problem when you’re talking about war. You don’t know if I’m talking about Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or Sudan.

As the interview continued, Stewart elaborated on his point that the Bush Doctrine is meaningless if it isn’t applied evenly throughout the world and in the process ripping apart the argument that Stephen Hayes makes in his book, The Connection. Here we have a guy who’s written a book claiming that Saddam Hussein worked with al Qaeda, and he’s getting his ass handed to him by a comedian.

The way The Daily Show should work is that they mention a news item that we’re familiar with in order to set up some jokes. Unfortunately, with the news often beating stories to death rather than dig up new ones, The Daily Show is now in a situation in which it’s doing a better job covering important stories than the “real” news. For a good example of this, check out this post that compares the coverage of the State Department’s “mistake” on 2003′s global terrorism report card.

As far as I’m concerned, we should just stop calling The Daily Show “fake” news. True, they’re a comedy show, but how is what Jon Stewart (et. al.) doing much different than what what Bill O’Reilly does? The only big difference I see is that The Daily show mixes it’s news with comedy while the O’Reilly Factor mixes it’s news with bombast.

UPDATE : I posted this comment to E-Rock’s post that disagrees somewhat with my conclusions. Hopefully this clarifies things some :

I was exaggerating a bit, but I think that The Daily Show has eclipsed the real news in two important respects :

1) They’re providing better insight and raising more important points than the most of the news organizations that they parody. Could you imagine the questions that Jon Stewart asked last night coming out of the mouths of Larry King or Paula Zahn?

2) They’re providing more coverage for some actual news stories than the cable news networks. Take a look at the post I linked to and you’ll see that that the news outlets were mostly ignoring the huge news that the Bush Administration’s self-evaluation of their success on fighting terrorism was wrong.

Unlike Politically Incorrect, SNL, or The Onion, The Daily Show is finding itself in a position of “breaking” news not because they’re journalists, but because our media has been dropping the ball.

Since I’ve been slashdotted, I’d imagine that the majority of the people reading this site today could care less about politics. That being the case, here’s a question I’ve got for you guys : What do you think about the Federal Trade Commission’s decision to oppose the creation of a “Do Not Spam” list? Personally, I think a list like that would never work since spammers can just move their servers offshore. That being the case (and feel free to disagree with me on that), what can we do to stop it? Here’s an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while :

The first thing we need to do is come up with a definition of spam beyond the standard “I know it when I see it”. While “unsolicited mass email” is a nice, vague description, it’s still a little too broad. For example, I work for a big company that sends out millions of emails a day for various newletters, greetings, etc. While these emails may sometimes fit into the criteria above, they’re definitely not spam. Yet, some of the more aggressive spam blocking solutions out there have our company’s email servers “flagged”.

Once we’ve seperated the wheat from the chaff, the next step would be to come up with some anti-spam laws. Due to the lack of a federal anti-spam law, this is handled on a state-by-state basis. Since spammer can simply move their servers outside the jurisdiction of any anti-spam laws, it seems to me that even federal laws will be toothless. At this point, the only real way to regulate this is through international means.

Which leads to the crux of my idea, which is that an international body of some sort should come up with some anti-spam laws that have equal penalties in each of the countries that sign onto the agreement. The keey to making this work however would be that any countries who don’t agree with the terms laid out would have their internet access to and from any of the anti-spam countries blocked at the backbone level. Simply put, if you facilitate spammers, you don’t get to play with the rest of the internet.

Of course this all just a totalitarian fantasy that would never work. Even if we could all agree on all of the conditions I outlined above in a way that doesn’t infringe on anyone’s online freedom, we still live in a country in which the person in charge of the Justice Department thinks Left Behind belongs in the non-fiction section of the bookstore and that any international cooperation is a step towards everyone getting “666″ tattooed on our foreheads.

This is what we get when we have leaders who put their own prejudices above the interests of national security :

Even with concerns growing about military troop strength, 770 people were discharged for homosexuality last year under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, a new study shows.

The figure, however, is significantly lower than the record 1,227 discharges in 2001 ? just before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Since “don’t ask, don’t tell” was adopted in 1994, nearly 10,000 military personnel have been discharged ? including linguists, nuclear warfare experts and other key specialists.
. . .
Hundreds of those discharged held high-level job specialties that required years of training and expertise, including 90 nuclear power engineers, 150 rocket and missile specialists and 49 nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare specialists.

Eighty-eight linguists were discharged, including at least seven Arab language specialists.

Before you feel like reminding me that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was from Clinton, lemme remind you that 9/11 supposedly “changed everything”. If we’re serious about fighting terrorism, policies like this should be the first to go. At the very least, the whole “unit cohesion” argument doesn’t hold a lot of water (not that it ever did) when we’re talking about guys who sit in cubicles all day translating emails. George Bush could change this with a phone call if he wanted to, but he’d rather placate his conservative base.

Yeah, this is an old story, but since it’s one of the headlines on CNN, it’s worth revisiting :

Ray Bradbury is demanding an apology from filmmaker Michael Moore for lifting the title from his classic science-fiction novel “Fahrenheit 451″ without permission and wants the new documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11″ to be renamed.

“He didn’t ask my permission,” Bradbury, 83, told The Associated Press on Friday. “That’s not his novel, that’s not his title, so he shouldn’t have done it.”

The 1953 novel, widely considered Bradbury’s masterpiece, portrays an ugly futuristic society in which firemen burn homes and libraries in order to destroy the books inside and keep people from thinking independently.
. . .
Bradbury, who is a registered political independent, said he would rather avoid litigation and is “hoping to settle this as two gentlemen, if he’ll shake hands with me and give me back my book and title.”
. . .
Bradbury’s book was made into a 1966 movie directed by Francois Truffaut. A new edition of the book is scheduled for release in eight weeks, Bradbury said, and plans are in the works for a new film version, to be directed by Frank Darabont.

As many people have pointed out, Bradbury “borrowed” the title “Something Wicked This Way Comes” from Shakespeare and ” I Sing The Body Electric” from Walt Whitman, so it’s not like he’s got firm ground to stand on here. It’s made even more ludicrous by Ray’s insistence that Michael “give back” his book, as if Fahrenheit 451 itself was stolen.

What I think is even crazier is that I had no idea Truffaut made that movie. Is it any good? I had just assumed that the only versions of 451 that had made it to the screen were cheesy TV movies made in the 70s.