How awesome is this?

Boy, I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue.

Posted by: Ace at 06:48 PM | Comments (20)
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.

Someone who didn't leave their name tips to this good Command Post essay:

It's the currency of exchange for daily life, and mainstream news organizations (at least before the blogs) have been our banks of information: they held the currency, and they distributed it to the populace. And in serving that role, we made a similar investment in the mainstream media: We invested our faith.

Which is where CNN has something to learn from Pep Boys. Publicly traded companies must now begin to provide high levels of transparency if they hope to keep the faith of their investors. The same is now true for MSM news outlets. For ... well, forever, really Â… theyÂ’ve been able to live in a world with no transparency, and make choices about how to handle the investment of faith by others without accountability to the investor.

Not any more. Now The Flow, facilitated by the blogs, are pulling back the covers on our banks of public trust. Dan Rather, Howell Raines, Eason Jordan Â… they were the CEOs of those information banks. For decades they've made choices of how to handle the consumerÂ’s investment without providing any visibility into direction or intention. They've had their ENRON here and their WorldCom there ... we just never learned of them. Now, the blogs are forcing transparency upon you, and some consumers are rightly finding that their investment hasnÂ’t been treated as well as the like.

Same basic point I made earlier, but from a different angle. The media, because its function is as a gatekeeper of information, has been more successful at hiding its errors and biases and, well, lies than any other industry.

That's changing, and they don't seem to like it. The scrutiny they apply to government and business -- "sunlight is the best disinfectant" and all that -- is now being applied to them, and they're whining about it like truculent children.

Hey-- every other industry and profession has had to deal with outside media scrutiny since the invention of, well, the news itself. Why on earth should the media itself be immune?

Posted by: Ace at 01:14 PM | Comments (23)
Post contains 364 words, total size 2 kb.

Wizbang will be collecting up all the posts filed by the various bloggers at CPAC; details can be found here. He'll just be posting the first several lines so if you can see if it's something you're interested in.

You can also view all the credentialed bloggers at that post. There's some famous ones, some not so famous, and some who are named Wonkette.

No offense to Wonkette, but God forbid there should be a political gathering at which she isn't credentialed. My stars, I think the entire structure of the universe would come unravelled. (And no offense to Wizbang or Redstate for that either!)

He says I should include Javascript code to list the bloggers on my own site, but quite frankly I have no freaking idea what he's talking about.

Posted by: Ace at 01:05 PM | Comments (10)
Post contains 136 words, total size 1 kb.

Well, it's descended to that. The left is whooping it up over their allegations that Jeff Gannon is gay. They've scored a real journalistic coup.

Let me tell you something: Jeff Gannon is the straightest, most masculine man I've ever met. He is all-man, straight as an arrow (a very heterosexual arrow, let me add), even when he pounds me up the mantang every alternate Thursday.

Nay-- especially when he's dorking me up my squeaker.

Like a Viking, baby.

At any rate...

PARODY ALERT

The following link contains parody/satire not to be taken as true.

...My Pet Jawa thinks he's found Atrios' own gay-singles ad.

And lots of other good links at the post, too.

For the love of Pete...

Is this really what it's coming down to, Leftosphere? Is this 1) as good as you give and 2) the sort of stuff you're proud to be "reporting"?

Give me a break.

And Didja Notice... The MSM was very quick to pick up on this nothing of a story -- Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post wrote about it days after the leftosphere started making allegations -- and yet said nothing about Easongate until Eason Jordan was forced to resign.

Kinda funny.

Posted by: Ace at 12:40 PM | Comments (28)
Post contains 216 words, total size 1 kb.

I'm not sure if I ever posted the German brothel story -- a story about women being told they might have to take jobs as sex-workers (i.e., whores) or lose welfare benefits -- but if I did, I guess I have to note that Snopes "debunks" the story.

But a sharp-eyed reader of NRO's The Corner debunks that debunking, and notes that Snopes is hopelessly left-leaning.

I think the same. I remember reading one "debunking." It concerned Hillary Clinton's volunteering to work for the criminal defense of a Black Panther accused, I think, of murder.

Snopes claimed, basically, that the story wasn't true. Except, when you read the "debunking," all the facts of the story were stipulated as being true. Snopes basically added "context," arguing how important it is to give murderers the best defense and all that jazz, and, on the basis of this "context," "determined" the story to be "false."

Except, you know, the story wasn't false. What Snopes was really claiming was that while the facts were true, it would be "false" to draw any negative inferences about Hillary Clinton from those facts.

Ummm, Snopes? Go F--- yourself. "True" means true and "False" means false. You're supposed to be fact-checking, not interpretation-checking.

Snopes does that with an awful lot of political stories. Time and time again, it brands stories "false" not because the facts alleged are proven to be untrue but because Snopes just sort of doesn't like the cause the facts have been enlisted in serving.

So, read Snopes at your own risk. For urban legends and email scams, it's a great site.

For anything having to do with politics, it's a lefty spin-site.

Thanks for both tips to NickS.

The Missing Link Update: Here's the Snopes non-debunking of the Hillary Clinton/Black Panther story. Decide for yourself if this is fact-checking or just liberal spin about uncontested facts.

Posted by: Ace at 08:08 AM | Comments (35)
Post contains 324 words, total size 2 kb.

How many government officials and business executives have lost their jobs due to the media reporting (occasionally selectively) on their malfeasance?

Quite a few, I think. And yet the media never shed tears about this; it's quite necessary, they assure us. They are the watchdogs, and sometimes watchdogs need to take a bite. And sometimes those bites costs people their jobs and even ruin careers.

I think that's more or less true, although I also think that "investigative journalists" tend to sweeten their stories for maximum impact-- making for a more dramatic story, with more clear malfeasance, than a straight reporting of the facts might show.

But now several journalists have lost their jobs due to their malfeasances being investigated and critiqued and publicized by bloggers and other alternative media sources.

And now we have David Gergen blubbering like a heartbroken eighth-grader about how tremendously unfair this is. Others suggest it might even be a danger to democracy itself.

I grow tired of the media suggesting, implicitly or explicitly, that it is the one institution (well, maybe apart from the UN) that requires no outside monitoring or criticism -- no checks and balances, no external reviews or investigations -- in the entire damn-bastard world.

Howell Raines, Dan Rather, and Eason Jordan all committed gross malfeasance during their tenures. Were they CEO's of failing companies, who had made poor decisions that cost their shareholders money and their employees jobs, the media would of course have little qualms about exposing them and driving them from office.

And yet the media whines about this. Yet another double-standard which, shockingly enough, inures to their advantage: We can ask questions and investigate and even harass whoever we think is doin' wrong; but don't anyone dare put the same sort of harsh spotlight on us.

If investigation is good -- if external review is good -- if bringing attention to gross malfeasance is generally a good thing when the media is doing the investigating, how on earth can they claim with a straight face that such investigations are a threat to our very way of democracy when they're the ones being investigated?

Tim Blair dissects a NYT piece whining about the scary new world of the watchmen themselves being watched.

The New York Times cries:

In September, conservative bloggers exposed flaws in a report by Dan Rather; he subsequently announced that on March 9 he would step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News.” On Friday, after nearly two weeks of intensifying pressure on the Internet, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, abruptly resigned after being besieged by the online community. Morever, last week liberal bloggers forced a sketchily credentialed White House reporter to quit his post.

To which Blair responds:

This story could have been written at any time in the past forty years. Simply change a few words and you’d have a piece about politicians/builders/executives/whoever “abruptly resigning” after “being besieged by the journalistic community.” Certain footwear now resides on an alternate pedal extremity, and journalists don’t like it.

As John McClane said: "Welcome to the party, pals."

Scrutiny is a good thing. Journalists tell us this everytime they collect one of their own scalps.

They cannot now claim that scrutiny is bad, at least when that scrutiny is fixed on their own errors and lapses.

Posted by: Ace at 07:54 AM | Comments (9)
Post contains 568 words, total size 4 kb.

I think all this scandal-mongering gets a bit old after a while, but, since the media is showing no interest at all (shocker), I guess we might as well keep ourselves informed about the Justice Department's investigation into Vermont's hospital system during Dean's tenure as governor.

And we might as well recall that Howard Dean's cabinet was as diverse as your typical Deerfield Academy crew squad.

And, unrelated but on Tim Blair's site, you can check out Al Franken being insulted by Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog ("I have a conch shell with more listeners").

Posted by: Ace at 07:40 AM | Comments (8)
Post contains 103 words, total size 1 kb.

Michelle Malkin reports that Bertrand Pecquerie (who?!? exactly) says that bloggers are "the sons of McCarthy." And he doesn't mean Charlie.

Meanwhile, this just pisses me off. The Tulsa World has sent letters threatening dubious legal action against Oklahoma bloggers for printing excerpts of their stories.

Now, okay, we know there's this vague "fair use" doctrine, and sometimes the writer of the story has a different idea of what constitutes "fair use" than the excerpter/quoter/blogger does. That's an age old fight.

But get this:

The Tulsa World is also demanding -- on pain of "legal action" -- that these bloggers stop linking copyrighted Tulsa World content.

Get that? Links are now some sort of copyright infringement.

Bloggers: It's coming, so get ready for it. Start trimming down the articles you cite and try paraphrasing more. Err on the cautious side of the fair use doctrine.

Because the next phase in this battle is nonstop legal harassment.

They've had a monopoly for 50 years and they're not giving it up without a fight... or at least without calling in their lawyers.

A Primer on Fair Use: from our good friends at Nerf-Coated World.

Worth reading.

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 PM | Comments (40)
Post contains 224 words, total size 2 kb.

It's John From Wuzzadem. Just click.

The Chris Rock bit above it is pretty good, too.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 PM | Comments (3)
Post contains 28 words, total size 1 kb.

In the Johnny Carson "I did not know that" file:

The New Republic's Ryan Lizza has a fascinating account of how "a guerrilla squad of Democratic bloggers" knocked down every other contender for the post [to clear the field for Howard Dean]. An example is ex-Rep. Tim Roemer of Indiana, who had the backing of Harry Pelosi and Nancy Reid:

The entire field of candidates, in concert with the insular liberal blogosphere, rose up and destroyed Roemer.

The hit was silent and deadly. One day I received by messenger a dirty and smudged envelope with no return address. Inside were five pages of anti-Roemer opposition research about his positions on everything from Israel and abortion to labor and Social Security. The same information was fed to numerous blogs, which quickly declared Roemer anathema. "Unless Roemer publicly, loudly, and completely repudiates his recent [pro-privatization] position on Social Security, he is utterly unacceptable as DNC chair," said a post on the pro-Dean site MyDD.com, which served as a key clearinghouse of information about the race. (Roemer did repudiate that position, but it wasn't enough.)

By the time Roemer showed up on "This Week" for a Sunday morning announcement of his candidacy, which, in the old days, might have helped solidify him as the establishment choice, he was badly damaged. He spent most of his interview with George Stephanopoulos defensively responding to bloggers he had clearly never heard of, like MyDD and The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum. . . .

Roemer never recovered. ...

What's interesting here isn't the medium--the rise of bloggers is old news--but the message. In a column presumably filed before Jordan quit, U.S. News & World Report's Michael Barone contrasts the Howard Dean ascendancy with the Dan Rather scandal:

What hath the blogosphere wrought? The left blogosphere has moved the Democrats off to the left, and the right blogosphere has undermined the credibility of the Republicans' adversaries in Old Media. Both changes help Bush and the Republicans.

Interesting. I had no idea that left-wing bloggers had cleared the field for Dean. I thought they were too busy working on this HUGE ENORMOUS JEFF GANNON MEGA-SCANDAL.

So they got their scalps, too.

But, as BOTW notes, the dynamic here is right bloggers dragging leftwing institutions closer to the center, and left bloggers dragging leftwing institutions closer to the left wing.

We'll see how that works out for them.

Posted by: Ace at 07:18 PM | Comments (14)
Post contains 415 words, total size 3 kb.