Nominations are now open for the Wampum’s annual Koufax Awards. It’s mostly a fight between Atrios and Kos for best blog, but like every good awards show, the most interesting nominees are in the supporting categories. There’s a lot of good stuff linked from those threads. You can submit your own nominations in the comments of the most recent post.

Like I said last week, the best way to fight the morality police is to use their tactics to ensure conservatives are held to the same standards they expect of us. Atrios has the scoop on some conservative “indecency” (thanks to reader dfandbj):

1. Go to http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/menu/rush.guest.html and find your Limbaugh station.

2. Send an email to fccinfo@fcc.gov with your own version of the following:

On Monday, December 13 in the 2nd hour of his program (1pm EST) broadcast on [CALL SIGN HERE], Rush Limbaugh used the vulgar, sexual term “dick” when referring to a Miss Plastic Surgery pageant. Specifically, Limbaugh said:

“LIMBAUGH: Miss Plastic Surgery. (chuckle) And ? I?d ? I?d ? I ? I don?t ? I don?t know what the winner ? I ? and, oh, I didn?t print out both pages, so I don?t know what the ? I don?t know what the winner gets. Probably a certificate to go to San Francisco to have an add-a-dick-to-me operation. “

According to the FCC:

Information regarding the details of what was actually said (or depicted) during the allegedly indecent, profane or obscene broadcast. There is flexibility on how a complainant may provide this information. The complainant may submit a significant excerpt of the program describing what was actually said (or depicted) or a full or partial recording (e.g., tape) or transcript of the material.

In whatever form the complainant decides to provide the information, it must be sufficiently detailed so the FCC can determine the words and language actually used during the broadcast and the context of those words or language. Subject matter alone is not a determining factor of whether material is obscene, profane, or indecent. For example, stating only that the broadcast station ?discussed sex? or had a ?disgusting discussion of sex? during a program is not sufficient. Moreover, the FCC must know the context when analyzing whether specific, isolated words are indecent or profane. The FCC does not require complainants to provide recordings or transcripts in support of their complaints. Consequently, failure to provide a recording or transcript of a broadcast, in and of itself, will not lead to automatic dismissal or denial of a complaint.

The date and time of the broadcast. Under federal law, if the FCC assesses a monetary forfeiture against a broadcast station for violation of a rule, it must specify the date the violation occurred. Accordingly, it is important that complainants provide the date the material in question was broadcast. A broadcaster?s right to air indecent or profane speech is protected between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Consequently, the FCC must know the time of day that the material was broadcast.

If you wanna add an extra layer of irony to your complaint, I suggest using this fancypants complaint form set up by those moral watchdogs the Parents Television Council. Maybe if the complaint looks like it’s coming from them, the FCC will pay more attention.

For those of you looking for tracks for an annual X-mas CD/mixtape, let me point you towards The Beatles Christmas Records. These were on the first Beatles bootleg I ever bought and I still think they’re one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever heard. Released to fanclub members every year between 1963 and 1969, these records started out as a nice little “year in review” / “thank you” gift. As the band members began drifting away from each other, they got weirder and weirder. They reached their peak with the 1968 record that features Tiny Tim singing “Nowhere Man”, Ringo performing a bizarre phone call skit, Paul singing a repetitive “Happy Christmas” song that sounds like it was edited down from a three-hour runtime, and John reciting a poem that, in retrospect, serves as a thinly-veiled “fuck you” to the rest of the band for mistreating Yoko. Merry Crimble, everybody!

Since Amazon doesn’t seem to have an easy way for you to email a prioritized version of your wishlist to your friends and family, here’s the steps on how to avoid having the most recent items be the only ones your family sees :

Prioritize your wishlist - No, I’m not being cheeky here. The first thing you need to do is assign a priority to every item on your list. The quickest way to do this is to click on the “Compact View” link at the top of your wishlist and make all the updates at once. Once you’ve given every item on the page a 1-5 rank, don’t forget to click the “Save Changes” button.

Email your wishlist to yourself - You could go through the long, convoluted URL that’s currently in your browser to find your user ID, but this is a bit easier. Just send the “Share Your Wishlist” notification to your email and you’ll get a URL that’ll look something like this :

http://amazon.com/gp/registry/1BL4NBBAVVCQE

The portion in red at the end is the user ID I was referring to.

Put your user ID in a new URL - Copy your user ID from the step above and place it into the URL below in the place that’s also in red :

http://amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/
?id=1BL4NBBAVVCQE&sort=priority

Once you’ve done that, put the URL into your browser. You should now see the items you want the most at the top of your page.

Email your new URL to your friends and family - Don’t bother with the impersonal email notifications from Amazon. Write your own letter to your loved ones and avoid the middle-man. If you feel a little weird about sending it yourself, use your email to ask for wishlists from everyone else.

(Bonus Step) - If you don’t want Amazon to have a virtual monopoly over your online purchases, use the comments field of your wishlist to give alternate suggestions for items that aren’t available on Amazon or to point people towards places they can get the items cheaper. My wishlist has a couple items that say things like “I’d love to have this, but don’t spend more than $40 for it”.

Yes, it’s a little complicated, but until Amazon offers the obvious feature to prioritize the wishlist that you share by default, this is the best way to do it (as far as I know). If there’s a simpler solution (that doesn’t involve me writing a javascript application to take care of steps 2 & 3 automatically), I’d love to hear it.

This whole Bernard Kerik thing really bugs me. For a little background, here’s Kevin Drum’s summery from the other day :

On Friday he withdrew his nomination to be secretary of homeland security, saying he had “discovered” that a former nanny might have been an illegal alien and that he might have, um, inadvertantly failed to pay all the required taxes during her employment. Thus Kerik joins a distinguished line of “nanny problem” politicians stretching from Michael Huffington to Zoe Baird to Linda Chavez.
. . .
Here’s what’s amusing: apparently nanny problems are now so common and well accepted that they’ve become a standard excuse to cover up more serious offenses. Heck, it almost makes you a martyr, since the chattering classes unanimously agree that nanny issues are trivial ? it’s just so hard to find good help these days ? and are used mostly as political payback anyway.

(For more background on why Kerik really withdrew his name, Josh Marshall’s been following the arrest warrants, mob ties, and that woman he was shtupping.)

The fact that, as Kevin pointed out, employing an illegal worker is seemingly “no big deal” infuriates me to no end. Even if you take aside all the other allegations of misdeeds on Kerik’s part, the “nanny problem” alone should be enough to disqualify him from public life. Even if it’s just one employee, this is a small part of a much, much larger problem that extends from sweatshops to farm labor to the homes of the richest people in this country. In the end, it screws everyone involved, except for the employers.

First of all, let’s cut through the lie that immigrants who sneak into the country are doing jobs that Americans won’t do. That’s bullshit. It’s not that American workers aren’t willing to pick fruit or clean up garbage, it’s that they’re unwilling to do it for practically nothing. Illegal immigrants, on the other hand, are willing to put up with much worse treatment since they’re often unaware of their rights and kept in fear of being deported. If anything it’s the workers who are being exploited, yet conservatives have found a way to turn these victims into bogeymen who are stealing jobs that were never legal to begin with.

But American workers also have a point when they complain about losing jobs to immigrants since, in a way, they’re being doubly-screwed. On the one hand, every job that’s being offered illegally is one less job that would be filled by a member of our labor force. On the other hand, undocumented workers (isn’t that a lovely euphemism?) aren’t paying into the tax system, so they’re essentially cashing in on some of the benefits that they didn’t help pay for.

Let’s take a step back and look at this problem. In one corner we’ve got the displaced American laborer, who’s justly pissed that their jobs are disappearing and that the number of people coming into the country to compete for (presumably) the same jobs. In the other, we’ve got the immigrant worker, who’s working longer hours in unsafe working conditions and is just trying to have a better life in their new home. The immigrants are angry for being made scapegoats, the Americans are pissed because they’re unable to find work, and everyone’s pissed because the problems seem to be getting worse and worse. On top of all that, when you consider that most of the workers we’re talking about are of Asian or Latino descent, these tensions get further amplified with a tinge of racism.

Yet, there’s one party that’s constantly left out of this equation : The employers.

They’re the ones who deserve the blame here. They’re screwing the Americans and the immigrants by going around every labor and tax law they can get away with. Yet, these employer crimes are rarely kept in the correct context. It’s not simply a matter of a few minor OSHA violations and some tax evasion, this the violation of the most fundamental rules that keep our economy strong. If every worker can’t be guaranteed a bare minimum in working conditions, wages, and benefits, what’s to stop the race to the bottom? These employers aren’t simply petty lawbreakers of the white-collar variety, they’re exploitative criminals who should face a long stint in prison.

Where’s the outrage over this? I’d think this would be an issue that (real) conservatives and liberals could equally champion. For liberals it would mean better working conditions and a strengthened labor force. For conservatives it would mean seriously disrupting the “supply and demand” that feeds our immigration problem. As long as there’s a supply of shitty jobs, there will be people willing to sneak into the country to fill them.

Granted, I’m oversimplifying this problem, lumping together the twin problems of tax evasion and various labor law violations, ignoring inconvenient questions (like “What happens to the workers if their bosses go to jail?” or “How do we convince people to become whistleblowers?”), and doing nothing to account for degrees of severity (ex. not paying taxes on a worker who is otherwise well-paid obviously isn’t the same as running a sweatshop). My point in all this is that when it comes to illegal workers, we shouldn’t fall into the “us vs. them” trap that makes it easier for the real bad guys here to avoid any responsibility. This is a very, very serious problem that needs to be debated, but that isn’t gonna happen until we start realizing that we’re all victims here in one way or another. Well…almost all of us.

Conservatives love to find horror stories about people who get a windfall because of a corporation’s criminal negligence, but I doubt they’ll speak up much about this frivolous lawsuit :

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which promotes itself as a seller of clean music, deceived customers by stocking compact discs by the rock group Evanescence that contain the f-word, a lawsuit claims.
. . .
The complaint, filed Thursday in Washington County Circuit Court, seeks an order requiring Wal-Mart to either censor or remove the music from its Maryland stores. It also seeks damages of up to $74,500 for each of the thousands of people who bought the music at Wal-Marts in Maryland.

“I don’t want any other families to get this, expecting it to be clean. It needs to be removed from the shelves to prevent other children from hearing it,” said plaintiff Trevin Skeens of Brownsville.

Skeens said he and his wife, Melanie, let their daughter buy the music for her 13th birthday and were shocked when they played it in their car while driving home.

Because their 13-year-old heard the word “fuck”, this guy thinks Wal-Mart owes him seventy-five thousand dollars. Perhaps he needs the money to build a dungeon to keep their daughter in seclusion so they never again have to worry about bad words corrupting her precious little mind.

Is Tim Burton shitting on your childhood the way he did with Planet of the Apes? Or is it a brilliant re-imagining of a classic story? There will be plenty of strong reactions to this trailer for his “re”-make of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Based on the trailer alone, I have serious misgivings about the title song and Depp’s filling of Gene Wilder’s shoes (which is a near-impossible task to begin with). These shots from what I assume are the post-death Oompa-Loompa songs have me especially worried :

Am I the only one who gets a “Cat in the Hat” vibe from this? (the movie, not the book) Let’s all hope he doesn’t decide to remake the Wizard of Oz next.

UPDATE : Heh. It looks like my instincts were good. Both movies share the same production designer. As far as the rest of the movie goes, I really hope Burton doesn’t make the mistake of exagerrating the creepy subtext of the book and original movie. Other things I wanna mention about the trailer:

The chocolate river looks like it’ll be a great improvement over the brown-water from the original. That always bugged me.

I look forward to seeing what the deal is with the dentist, underwater, and jungle scenes.

The boat and TV room look like they might be faithful to the original film, but I hope they leave in the cheezy sound effects and stock-footage of a chicken getting its head chopped off.

Johnny Depp’s weird hand wave and gum rhyme are obnoxious.

Finally, I can’t believe they’d end the trailer with Wonka banging his head into the camera. Do they really want us to believe that there wouldn’t be a banana peel around somewhere for him to slip on? It is a candy factory after all.

For the past couple days, BoingBoing has been posting some fascinating pictures of medical artwork that’s hundreds of years old. Today’s entry reminded me of something I saw at the Body Worlds exhibit that’s currently at the California Science Center :

For those of you unfamiliar with the exhibit, yes, that’s a real human body holding its skin. If you’d like to know more about how the hell they do that, click here.

This is defamatory bullshit. Here’s hoping CBS gets sued for libel (via the victim):

Hypothetically, if The Washington Post discovered that The New York Times had a reporter being paid by the Bush campaign it would report it. If proven, the suspect reporter would be fired and likely never work in mainstream journalism again. Hence, the courts have been satisfied with the industry?s ability to regulate itself.

In the case of Duncan Black, this is what happened. The author of the popular liberal blog Atrios, Black wrote under a pseudonym. All the while, he was a senior fellow at a liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America.

?People are pretty smart in assuming that if a blog is making a case on one side that it?s partisan,? Jamieson said. ?The problem is when a blog pretends to hold neutrality but is actually partisan.?

That is not a legal problem, however, but an ethical one. Black eventually claimed credit for his blog and fellow bloggers heavily publicized his political connections. But he is still blogging.

It’s not about being accused of partisanship (which he obviously is on his personal site), but being accused by CBS of being paid by a partisan organization while professing to offer non-partisan coverage. In fact, the opposite is true in that Media Matters is a non-partisan organization and Eschaton is a partisan (to a a degree) website.

Let me cut through most of the quotation above and get to the heart of this slanderous attack on Atrios :

Hypothetically, if The Washington Post discovered that The New York Times had a reporter being paid by the Bush campaign it would report it.
…
In the case of Duncan Black, this is what happened.

Nevermind the fact that what Atrios is being accused of isn’t even a crime. The fact is, scurrilous charges like these are direct attacks on his professional reputation. Imagine for a moment that Glenn Reynolds had secretly been on the Bush campaign’s payroll all year. Once news like that were made public, it could seriously hurt his career. His traffic would likely fall once readers figure out he’s a paid shill whose opinions have been sold to the highest bidder. His advertisers would pull out rather than have their brands associated with the Jayson Blair of the blogosphere. The demand for his services as a columnist would all but disappear as his name becomes an in-joke among editors everywhere. This is exactly the sort of scenario that could occur if the “Atrios is a paid propagandist” lie is allowed to fester. I were in his shoes I’d be tracking down the phone number of a good lawyer.

And don’t even get me started on the article’s insinuation that blogs need to be regulated….

I wish this was a joke :

Look for national parks’ geology to be written more in the image of creationists over the next four years in the continuing effort to create “faith-based parks.” An ongoing dispute at Grand Canyon National Park bookstores is that Grand Canyon, a Different View was ordered to stay on the bookshelves by top NPS brass. The book says that the Grand Canyon is 4,500 years old and was formed by Noah’s flood. Conventional scientific wisdom has the canyon more around 6 million years old, still rather young compared to the age of the Earth. Despite protests from scientists and the Grand Canyon Park superintendent, the book has stayed on the shelves. The Bush administration said it would review the policy, but the review hasn’t even been started since the February complaint. NPS has also ordered bronze plaques with verses from Psalms placed at canyon overlooks, truly emphasizing what a Judeo-Christian religious experience the view can be.

Of course, the belief that the Grand Canyon was carved out by the Biblical flood is completely ridiculous. Every thinking person knows that the canyon was created when Goliath (prior to being slain by David) scooped out a large chunk of land with his giant spoon and deposited it into the large piles that we now call the “Rocky Mountains”. A canyon caused by a flood?! That’s lunacy!

Seriously though, I don’t see why my “giant spoon” theory is any less plausible than the Noah’s flood theory that’s now polluting our national monuments. After all, both theories were reverse-engineered from a book written on the other side of the world hundreds of years ago. I’m all for religious tolerance, but I see no reason why we should be using our public parks to promote ignorance.