Wednesday December 31
The Danny Does It Again
When Steve Spurrier resigned yesterday as head coach of the NFL's Washington Redskins, many thought it was inevitable. I find it simply amazing that Spurrier left town with his tail between his legs, promising to come back for a third year on his five-season $25 million deal, and did not have the decency to announce his own resignation to the fans or the media. As Tony Kornheiser -- one of Spurrier's leading cheerleaders -- observed, "He's gone. He lost and he quit. He couldn't quit fast enough. He got in the sun for a couple of rounds and that was it. And it sure seems like he lied about his intentions recently."
Even more amazing is that Daniel Snyder, the team's owner, doesn't seem to care. Walking out on $15 million is the strongest indictment yet of working with the demanding and meddlesome Snyder. Spurrier's replacement will be the fifth head coach since Snyder bought the team in 1999. Spurrier's 32 games was also a record for longevity under Snyder. As Jon Saraceno writes in USAToday.com, "Snyder is like the tattooed freak at the circus -- everyone's laughing, and he doesn't seem to know or care. He goes through coaches the way Pamela Anderson goes through rock stars."
Posted by glenn at Tuesday December 30
Murrow Need Not Apply
Sunday night's "60 Minutes" interview with Michael Jackson was a charade, a ratings ploy with no journalistic integrity. CBS anchor Ed Bradley never challenged Jackson's story that Santa Barbara police had "manhandled" him during booking for child molestation, dislocated his shoulders, burned his arms and locked him in a bathroom covered in feces for 45 minutes. That Jackson was surrounded by his lawyers and security detail at the time never seems to have occured to Bradley. And now, CBS runs a story on its Web site-- teasingly titled Injury Claims A Sham? -- that is just too little, too late.
Instead of pandering to this whacko and pretending it was conducting an objective interview, CBS should have abandoned any pretense of having principles and given Jackson his own prime time special. Oh, they have done that was well. One month ago, CBS said airing a Jackson special would be "inappropriate," given the "gravity" of the charges" against the singer. Which we now know is just a euphemism for "after giving CBS News an exclusive interview denying all charges."
These guys have no honor, they have no pride, they have no principles. And they could certainly use some cohones. Edward R. Murrow, the iconic radio correspondent who launched CBS on its news leadership in the 1940s during WWII, would be ashamed of how his legacy has been tarnished.
Monday December 29
Mad Cow Mistakes
Seems that two of the major assumptions the Bush Administration is peddling about the Mad Cow disease found in a Washington State cow that was slaughtered are both wrong.
First, it has been determined (at least tentatively) that the animal was imported as a calf from Canada, making the point that international rules to prevent transfer of diseased livestock do not work. Second, while the U.S. Agriculture Department was adamant that the carcass was not delivered into the human food suppply, the fact is that the infected cow's meat reached retailers in eight Western states.
Japan, the EU and lots of other countries have banned US beef imports, for the same reason Canadian beef was banned last year and British beef before that. The US does not help its case by lying. And making pronoucements based on incomplete or inaccurate information that no infected meat was sold to humans is about as close to lying as one can come. That the truth only came out a week later just compounds the problem.
UPDATE: The government did a major about-frace yesterday, leading to this disturbing conclusion. "It seems almost inevitable that some part of the cow was eaten." It was killed on Dec. 9, and ground up with about 20 others to make a batch of 10,000 pounds of hamburger that was shipped to groceries in eight states and Guam, although 80 percent went to Oregon and Washington, the Agriculture Department says.
Mainstream Or Warning Sign?
The Internet Becomes Mainstream. So says a Pew Research Center report, released last week, which finds that 63% of the adult U.S. population regularly uses the Internet. While Pew found "increasing reliance on the Internet in everyday life and higher expectations about the way the Internet can be used in matters both mundane and mighty," the report also warns that "[d]espite this growth in activity, the growth of the online population itself has slowed. There was almost no growth over the course of 2002 and there has been only a small uptick in recent months." And it is even more problematic that "[a]bout a quarter of Americans live lives that are quite distant from the Internet –- they have never been online, and don’t know many others who use the Internet." So while the mainstream media, like the New York Times, headlined "The Growing Web," we may actually be seeing warning signs that the Internet is reaching its peak.
Saturday December 27
XM Rocks
I got XM Radio this week for my cars and have thoroughly enjoyed the service. It made me wonder why I hardly ever listen to music on the radio anymore, even though I am a devoted iTunes Music Store customer and have 20GB of digital music on my MP3 player.
Well, Stephen Holden, music critic for the New York Times, answers that in his article Critic's Notebook: High-Tech Quirkiness Restores Radio's Magic. Music beamed by satellite has resurrected "the thrill of musical discovery," he says, that has all but vanished on regular FM (terrestrial) radio.
Yes, XM rocks. But this helps explain why. Even the old stuff is new on XM. It's fun to listen without endless commercials and overly-loud DJ voice-overs, as well. At bottom, though, it offers a sense of variety and newness that one just cannot get on commercial FM radio these days. Blame Clear Channel or whatever, but that's a sad fact.
Wednesday December 24
Down With Pop-Ups
Things are becoming very interesting on the legal front in the Internet realm. With the U.S. courts blocking RIAA from violating privacy on suspicion of P2P file sharing and the Norwegian courts doing the same thing for DeCSS, the tide is moving away from copyright holders. Of course, then you get decisions like yesterday's against WhenU -- a pop-over advertising firm -- that enjoined its use of pop-ups on copyright grounds in a lawsuit brought by an e-commerce site owner. Judge Downs Pop-Ups in Contrary Decision [InternetNews.com]
Pop-ups are annoying, but it is a dangerous sign when the law uses copyright principles to ban entire technologies. The same thing happened to Napster. The irony, of course, is that the law can't put technology back in the can. So pop-ups are, in the final analysis, going to stand or fall based on their responsiveness to what consumers want. If we don't click 'em, they won't build them!!
Tuesday December 23
Frankly Speaking
Michael Kinsley writes in Slate about what he calls "the politics of mixed emotions," meaning that bad news for the country is good news to opposition candidates. There he notes that Howard Dean's concession that capturing Saddam Hussein was "frankly, a great day for the administration" is "a rare example of a politician saying 'frankly' and then saying something actually frank." Well said, both of you.
Space Images
The new Spitzer Space Telescope, successfully launched by NASA last August, is very cool. It photographs the infrared spectrum, getting behind the dust of space to capture images the naked eye never sees. Check out this sampling from the first release of Spitzer images.
Monday December 22
RIAA Unplugged
Well, another arrow has been shot into the rotting corpse of the Recording Industry Association of America. Even though their lawsuits against P2P file-sharing consumers had looked like they were becoming very successful, RIAA could only sue by using private subpoenas to force ISPs to reveal the names and addresses of their customers. Now, a federal court has said it can't do so anymore, that the DMCA does not allow subpeonas against ISPs unless the ISP itself is serving up the allegedly infringing material. RIAA: Shot Through the Heart? [TechNews.com]
I am sure RIAA will be back with some new strategy, but the tide has turned. As the court said, their argument "borders on the silly." But that has never stopped them before!!
Kissing Cute
So Joe Namath apparently said on the air yesterday, during a sideline interview with ESPN's Suzy Kolber, that he'd like to kiss her. That has led to some great headlines this mornning, like this one from the Indianapolis Star. Ex-Jets Great Namath's Sideline Pass is Incomplete. Could have been the drinks, since he seems to have been at least a little smashed, but if Broadway Joe thinks Suzie's cute, maybe she really does deserve a second look!!
People Are To Blame
In their Real Time column in the Wall Street Journal, Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry cogently point out that 2003 has not been a good year for the Internet.
That sort of sums it up for me. I've been online since 1987 and on the Net since 1994. The degree to which the Internet has changed lives, businesses and culture is fascinating. But it is well and truly a different place -- a more dangerous, annoying and sometimes revolting place -- than it was at the dawn of the Internet era. And people are to blame.
Friday December 19
Making Good On Past Mistakes
The courts in America have a long history of making really stupid decisions, out of deference to current passions and to the Executive Branch, that only decades later are recognized to be unsupportable. In the 19th century the Supreme Court held that black slaves were property -- the 1857 Dred Scott decision. The Civil War and the 13th Amendment overturned Dred Scott. Later (in 1897 in Plessy v. Ferguson) it ruled that "separate but equal" was adequate for public education, upholding Jim Crow laws in the South, something that stained this country until the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. And in its most infamous moment, the Korematsu opinion, the Court held that Japanese-American citizens could be interned in California concentration camps, and their property taken away, without any reasonable cause or suspicion, merely because of their race, due to the "exigencies" of World War II.
Well the courts attoned for these sins a little yesterday. In New York, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in Padilla v. Rumsfeld that holding U.S. citizens indefinitely without charges, on grounds that they have aided terrorists and are therefore "enemy combatants," is beyond the President's power. Their faces may be brown and heads covered with kaffiyeh, but the message is clear. Unlike WWII, the courts in today's war on terror are not going to sit idly by while the mob mentality infecting America's political response to terrorism runs roughshod over our constitutional rights and civil liberties. I say, thank God for that Constitution and the federal courts.
What A Day
I was watching World News Tonight on ABC last evening, and could not help but notice the tremendous diversity and importance of the stories in the news these days. The intelligence consequences of Saddam Hussein's capture for infiltrating the Iraqi resistance (and vice-versa), two rulings by US courts declaring unconstitutional the detention of US citizens, and foreign captives at Guantanamo, as "enemy combatants" without due process, the conviction of Lee Malvo (the teenage Washington sniper) for terrorism-murder and rejection of his insanity defense, the indictment of Michael Jackson for child sexual molestation, and a new strategy of "disengagement" from the Palestinians by Israel in response to the collapse of the Bush "Road Map" to peace.
Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. December 18, 2003 may not be a day to live in infamy, but with some more like this the world is going to continue to be a very exciting -- and dangerous -- place
Thursday December 18
Warm and Fuzzies For Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain Evokes Grand Comparisons [BBCNews.com]. Eight Golden Globes, Oscar buzz and wonderful reviews. It this movie is nearly as good as the book was, it should be wonderful.
PC-Culture Storm Troopers
Those witty folks over at The Onion have done a parody of all the PSAs about responsible drinking that fill the airwaves this time of year. It starts with this one and gets better from there.
It's good to know that not everyone in this country there has lost a sense of humor in this homogenized, PC-laden era. I mean, in the Washington Post yesterday Michael Wilbon lambasted a professional sports coach (Matt Millen of Detroit) for calling an opposing player (Johnny Morton of Kansas City) -- one who had burned his team repeatedly -- a "faggot" publicly. Well, well, queer eye for the media guys, it seems. Let people be people. It's an insult but not a slur; wasn't even a comment on "sexual orientation." This is getting ridiculous.
A Stand-Up Guy To the End
Jim Fassel, head coach of the New York Giants for the past seven seasons, has always been a class act. His best known bit was the 2000 mid-season playoff "guarantee" that carried the team to the Super Bowl. And his buck-stops-here attitude made him a rehreshing alternative to the bland media double-talk of most NFL coaches.
The Giants Fassel inherited in 1997 were an awful, aimless team with a losing attitude and a divided locker room. The defensive players resented the team's hapless offensive unit, the league's worst. The quarterback (Dave Brown) was hopeless. But by the dawn of this season, Fassel not only had mended the internals rifts but also helped turn the Giants' offense into the best in the league, one to be feared. With Fassel's guidance, Kerry Collins, plucked off the scrapheap in 1999, had developed into a first-rate NFL quarterback. The team was one game away from the NFC Championship last year, with only an errant field-goal snap to blame.
It may be a little hard to recall today, but back in August the Giants were considered the league's hottest young team, with a charismatic new star in Jeremy Shockey. Now mired at 4-10, losers of six straight, the Giants are a mess again. So Fassel fired himself, announcing yesterday he would not be back next season as coach, sparing the team further turmoil and once again showing his penchant for straight talk.
The Giants have no cheerleaders and don't use fancy jumbotron displays or rock music to jazz up fans. They are straight football. Fassel may not have taken the Giants to the promised land, but his classiness was perfect for the team and will be missed.
Wednesday December 17
Learning To Fly
They spent two years laboriously reconstructing a copy of the Wright Brothers' first powered airplane, but today -- the 100th anniversary of that first flight -- our modern 21st century engineers couldn't get off the ground and flopped in the mud at rain-soaked Kitty Hawk (now Kill Devil Hills), North Carolina [Reuters]. Shows how ingenious Oriville and Wilbur really were. The world has changed a lot as a result of their invention, mostly for the good, but it's still a place where 90% hard work isn't always enough to compensate for the lack of 10% inspiration. Apologies to Thomas Edison for butchering his aphorism.
Monday December 15
It's Not Over
This article by William Rivers Pitt should give pause to any of us who are ready to believe that caputuring Saddam Hussein is going to end Iraqi resistance to the American occupation.
Welcome to the new Iraq. The theme that the 455 Americans killed there, and the thousands of others who have been wounded, fell at the hands of pro-Hussein loyalists is now gone. The Bush administration celebrations over this capture will appear quite silly and premature when the dying continues. Whatever Hussein bitter-enders there are will be joined by Iraqi nationalists who will now see no good reason for American forces to remain. After all, the new rhetoric highlighted the removal of Hussein as the reason for this invasion, and that task has been completed. Yet American forces are not leaving, and will not leave. The killing of our troops will continue because of people like Kashid Ahmad Saleh. All Hussein's capture did for Saleh was remove from the table the idea that he was fighting for the dictator. He is free now, and the war will begin in earnest.
This suggests, as one national Republican politician told me last week, that what we are observing in Iraq may be the start of something new, the rise of a new global movement like Naziism or Communism. If that's right, one must seriously wonder whether the public humiliation of Saddam is helpful or just adds more fuel to the fire.
Not Done With Saddam?
Bill Safire wites today, in an op-ed piece teasingly titled From the "Spider Hole," that we're not done with Saddam Hussein yet.
I think we've seen the end of Saddam. One trial, string him up and close the books on this sorry episode in international human relations. At least I hope we're done with him. And that Saddam's not as smart as Safire.
Dean's A "Class Act"
Yes, even my friends at Right Thinking From the Left Coast say (albeit holding their toungues) that Howard Dean has "class" -- evidenced by his statement yesterday that capturing Saddam was a "great day for the Administration." [Right-Thinking Comments - Klassy Kerry]. Oh yes, John Kerry is "just a vile, disgusting human being."
Sunday December 14
What Hole Did He Crawl Out Of?
Sunday's papers were filled with stories, like Max Boot (Council of Foreign Relations) in the L.A. Times, talking about how the Bush Administration's many foreign policy mistakes left one wondering what happended to the vaunted Republican "A Team." All-Stars of Team Bush Fall Flat in Iraq.
But with the capture of Saddam Hussein announced just a few hours later -- actually, 7:00 a.m. Eastern time, if one was awake -- the political talk has suddenly all shifted to war crimes trials, crimes against humanity and the like.
Personally, all of this pales in comparison to the wonderful irony surrounding Saddam's capture. Cowering in a hole in the ground, hardly big enough to lie down in, with a pistol and Kalashnikov rifle, Hussein managed not a single shot of resistance. 
Not struggle at all. A haggard, tired and weak old man lamely raising his arms and saying he was "ready to negotiate." Like all of them going back to Napoleon and Hitler, this dictator too proved in the final analysis to be a small man, a coward at heart, concerned more with saving his own skin than fighting. These kinds of men talk big when they're carrying big sticks, but their characters are puny. If only their kind did not so often defile the pages of history.
Friday December 12
Can Dean Win?
Concervative pundit Bill Kristol writes in The Daily Standard that Howard Dean could actually win, beating President Bush in a general election. How Dean Could Win . . .
Hey, if the Right thinks so, maybe this guy is really for real. USA Today reports that Dean is leading by "outworking his rivals at conventional politics and at the same time taking risks that would be unthinkable to most politicians." I think it's the latter point that is making him so attractive.
Thursday December 11
Soft Money and Justice Thomas
Yesterday's 5-4 Supreme Court decision upholding the McCain-Feingold campaign reform act -- including its prohibition on use of corporate "soft money" and for funding of "issue" ads that mention candidates -- is really a very modest step. That is clear when one realizes how long America has been fighting against the corrupting influence of money in politics. It's been going on since Teddy Roosevelt, more than 100 years.
All of this yielded classic knee-jerk dissents by the Court's conservative core (Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas), who continue incorrectly to equate political contributions with political speech. But the most telling sign that the Right is whacked on this issue comes from Justice Clarence Thomas -- the silent one, still suffering the ignominy a decade+ later of Anita Hill -- who would not even agree that political ads "authorized" by a candidate must clearly identify that candidate. The vote here was 8-1, with everyone else on the Court joining.
This graphic from the Washington Post illustrates the point. I guess Thomas thinks that since politics is mostly about overstatement and misleading claims anyway, it is unimportant whether voters can be misled about who is making the claims. That's absurd, but it shows how out of touch and foolish Thomas remains all these years later.
Wednesday December 10
Caps Can Cassidy
Today the NHL's Washington Capitals fired second-year coach Bruce (Butch) Cassidy, who had led the team to the worst record in the league. [USAToday.com]. It's too little, too late, in my view. Caps owner Ted Leonsis -- of AOL fame -- knew going in to this season that he needed to get some real players to work with superstar Jaromir Jagr and generate speed for the offense. But instead what he and general manager George McPhee did was cut or trade all the veteran defensemen and sign some promising but very raw 19-year old rookie forwards. That's lead to the Caps giving up the most goals, usually falling behind in the first period. The rest is inevitable.
So this season's debacle was in the cards month ago. Cassidy is just a patsy. The Capitals should trade Ted Leonsis.
Gore and The Establishment
Readers of these pages know I am not a fan of former Vice President Al Gore. Yesterday's endorsement by Gore of presidential contender Howard Dean shows precisely why Gore is entitled to no respect. Dean's Internet Dynamism Among Attractions for Gore [Mercury News]. In 2000, Gore ran as a centrist, embracing populist rehetoric (rather than the Clinton Administration record) only in desperation in the campaign's final weeks. Now he has foresaken his one-time running mate Joe Lieberman -- who held up his own campaign launch out of deference to Gore -- without even a phone call. This is the same Joe Lieberman who in 2000 "sold his soul by reversing his lifelong positions on several key issues in order to align himself with the more liberal Al Gore." [AmericanDaily.com].
Seems that now Gore's suddently gotten religion and believes the Democrats must move even more to the left. Well, he may be right, but that switch repudiates all the political values Gore professed to hold dear while in office. As Dan Gilmore notes:
This is a classic, unprincipled move by someone who lacks any conviction. As Todd Purdum wrote in the New York Times, "The sudden marriage of such a seeming odd couple could wind up being seen as so politically expedient as to seem almost unprincipled, playing into the public's worst perceptions that campaigns are about power and winning, not big ideas." No shit, Sherlock. It's an illustration of why the Democrats are so weak that the media, and many Dean supporters, view the Gore endorsement as a "king-making" final act in the campaign.
In my view, it's the beginning of the end. Al Gore is a political kiss of death -- what Gore brings "is not his endorsement but his baggage" -- and Howard Dean should run as far and as fast as he can in the other direction.
Tuesday December 9
Sterile, Stupid and Fat
Great Britain is breeding "a generation of adults that will tend to be infertile, obese and prone to mental illness," the British Medical Association announced yesterday. [TimesOnline.com]. The research focuses on teens and is related largely to income levels, but the same conclusions seem to hold in the US as well. Not a pretty picture.
Monday December 8
Teach the World To Sing
Coca Cola's television commercials used to say that it "would like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony." Now, 30 years later, Coke has announced it will begin offering a digital music download service for the UK. [Reuters.com]. This time it's hardly idealistic, though, as this more recent initiative is just a belated reaction to Pepsi's deal with the Apple iTunes Music Store, in which the arch-rival soda maker will give away 100 million free song downloads. So put those love beads away and take the flowers out of your hair, people!!
Sunday December 7
Bad Boy Cat
The Universal Studios release of Mike Myers in The Cat in the Hat is quite funny. The film, which topped the USA cinema list last week, also has its share of detractors. Some, like Mary Pols of the Contra Costa Times, complain about the movie's double entendres (erections, "dirty 'hoes'" and more) and other "crude humor" that she labels "abhorrent." Others say that as a film it is just "weak and flat" or a "misguided adaptation" of the Dr. Suess story.
Well phoey on you all. I like it. Myers is as funny as in his Austin Powers series, and the "crude" humor was designed to go over the heads of little ones. My 12-year old didn't get half of the jokes anyway, but liked the film just as much as the 4-year olds in the row behind us. The movie could have used a bit more rhyme, but going from 223 words to 1 1/2 hours is a tribute in itself to the great Suess. You know, I bet they said the same things in 1934 about what The Wizard Of Oz did to L. Frank Baum's book. Get over it.
Friday December 5
My Brain Hurts
Even a little tipple shrinks your brain, according to the Times Online of London. Prior studies had found that moderate alcohol consumption reduced the risk of heart attack and stroke. Well, who needs to think anyway!!
Wednesday December 3
The Known Unknowns
Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld's aphorism that there are "known unknowns" has won this year's Foot In Mouth award. BBCNews.com The whole bit is worthy of a Saturday Night Live skit:
It's so good I plan to use it in a settlement meeting for one of my litigation cases tomorrow!!
Monday December 1
Downloadable Music Coming of Age
The New York Times ran a story this morning, titled "Music At Your Fingertips," discussing how online music distribution -- legitimized by Apple's iTunes Music Store -- is changing the business models of the record companies. Says the Times, "music labels and retailers [will] compete more aggressively online, offer[ing] more obscure titles and recordings of live performances that could find a paying audience through downloads but make no financial sense to distribute on CD's." As one who has been ripping CDs for five years now, this is a very welcome development, but it remains true that if "You've got a portable music player that can fit 10,000 songs on it . . . [n]o one will spend $1 a track filling it.'' Well, maybe if they chart this course the labels won't become extinct after all.