Journalists have a serious fixation on the competition from the blogs. A free-lancer I know is working up a story and I offered to turn him on to a few bloggers who have developed some sources, some expertise, some cachet in the subject matter he’s working. He thought about it and said, “No. I don’t want the bloggers to scoop me.”

Okay. He’s a young man and hasn’t learned that he’s already been scooped, that there’s nothing new under the sun, even in the age of gene splicing and instant global communication for the masses.

Less personal, more mainstream, is the reaction of the purveyors of dead trees to Jason Leopold’s story about the Rove indictment. When the indictment wasn’t forthcoming, Leopold and his publisher, truthout, were categorized as unethical bloggers with nothing to lose by publishing hearsay and speculation by writers in both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Leopold has a checkered past that he doesn’t hide, so the swiftboating efforts of the White House in this matter won’t harm him personally, but the journalists who are taken in by the easy slam, those who make Leopold the story instead of digging deeper into the matters surrounding Rove and Cheney are doing us all a disservice and wasting some fine pulpwood. The Rovesters have a special gene perhaps that peculiarly enables them to play Wimpy in a perpetual match of “let’s you and him fight.”

Michael Roberts offers a current take on the importance of the blogger/journalist distinction to the journos in the current online issue of Westword. Roberts, himself a paid professional, knocks a fellow from the Denver Post who appears to be commenting anonymously in threads following posts in a local political blog. Roberts uses that as a springboard to examine the ethics of anonymity and the exposure that salary-men in the writing profession suffer when they get down in the gutter with blogs.

Roberts misses a bet by not researching deeply enough to dig up real pros who crossover nicely, people like Ed Cone and Jay Rosen.

who cannot be fatally wounded, were itself learning to despise it a bit, we bring acquaintances, reason to turn this feeling against ourselves. And so will he says:”Friends, there are no friends!” the dying looked Trinity

i’m mean :: you’re a sanctimonious shithead
word :: de grouchy

even under the rim

just so’s you know my wings and i’m wired
duster if you will
buster
roomba lambkins
wild you between (earth sandwich) standup and sit down’s where the you like some bread?

- m. levy

* * *

Oddly roomba lambkins above has led me to a turning point around which buzz my thoughts like bees, puzzled that the hive’s been moved.

We need a guidebook. The truth awaits. There is no god, reason dominates. Every pope and every priest should do the perp walk, get booked, (ironic that it says that on the wall), spend the night in the can, join the junkies in the morning for arraignment, be tried, found guilty, identified as conspirators in the cartel of faith, organized oppression.

One single tiny facet on the glittering Hope diamond of truth and as good a place as any to start.

We know what we need and we know how to organize it, but we have to remember that we owe the mad beasts nothing, not life itself, nor cruel death, but we owe ourselves a grand usurpation, a retrieval of power that will put culture back in our hands, build hospitals, assure warm shelters, food, not just clothing but style, choice. Schools, and hang the fuckers foolish enough to trot out Bishop Ussher’s calculation, seventeenth century fanatic, he knew no better, but we do, damn it. Libraries. Bandwidth. Trains, boats, planes, sedans, roads, off-road vehicles where there no roads, but never, not ever, for a short hop to the strip mall.

We need to draw the roadmap. What does it take? What would it cost? What’s the peak demand for hospital beds across the world? How do we meet it? Chickens? Pots? Rice bowls full for everyone, and roadside asparagus and mayonnaise. What would it take? How many tractors running on what kind of fuel cultivating how many hectares planted in what kind of crops? Electricity. Pavement. Forested secret places with moist shadows and spring ephemerals. Vast herds of bison. Gnus for that matter. Video games and a walk on the veldt. Kill all the pampas grass growing wild in the cracked pavement of the World Airways terminal at Oakland airport. Spare the herring spawning there on the bayshore rocks. Restore some balance. Don’t let the polar bears drown. Limit combustion. Grow some glaciers.

All these things are possible and more, but first we have to remember to laugh heartily with the credulous, about the credulity, as we rescue them from their opiate slumbers. Free mental health care for monotheists, tough love and perhaps detachment. Leave them to jerk off behind the altars in empty crumbling churches smashed on cheap communion wine if they don’t want to get with the program. There will always be the stubborn others, but they have no right to spread that poison anymore.

Come. Join my church of the know-it-all. Send money. Remark on the “meet the new boss same as the old boss” irony of the great cycle of credulousness, but melt those chalices, pull down those foolish symbols of helplessness and let’s get on with the hopeless job of making it all better. I think we can have this party without inviting Madame da Farge. There are plenty of cells for the corporatists, the Bush fraternity of banal evil. Put them in there with the pederasts and the recidivists. Don’t allow their nattering to distract us from the planning, the building something new and brave and true.

Here’s a goofy number I ran across…

We could cause some inflammation
And lots of exudation
Necrosis of the spleen
Impetigo, a coma or perhaps a granuloma
If we only had the gene.

We could cause some pneumonitis
And pyelonephritis
Edema and gangrene
We could cause diarrhea and be really glad to see ya
If we only had the gene.

- by Jacqueline Jaeger Houtman

Brian Moffatt et fils were enjoying some time in Montreal while I was in Joisey.  I visited the in-laws while they basked in the uplifting company of Jon Husband and J. Alva Scruggs.  I’m jealous.  While they were being all urbane and sophisticated, I was hanging out with the in-laws.  Nice people, the in-laws, and so are their neighbors, but all that mid-Atlantic suburban/ex-urban in-fill has driven out most of the wildlife except for the squirrels.  I’m ready for another vacation already and I’ve been back for less than twenty-four hours.

In New Jersey, folks don’t as much “go to the beach” as they go “down the shore.” Yesterday we went “down the shore” to Point Pleasant Beach. In fact, we went down to the boardwalk, down by the sea. Sun, surf, seafood, miniature golf (!), a pleasant stroll with lots of people watching… a good time was had by all (except for Catherine, who suffered a slight sports injury on the links).

Locke opens the door a crack and we can see some introductory structure for the layers and layers of philosophy and ethics critique that he has been folding and rolling, buttering and folding and rolling, like some sort of literary phyllo dough at Mystic Bourgeoisie. He’ll never eat lunch in that town again.

Yule Heibel, via email to several smart and influential people and to me, sends information regarding Diigo, an annotational Web 2.0 thingie, that sort of combines the power of del.icio.us with the messiness of sticky-notes.

Yule says,

I learned of them when I read about their service in the MIT Technology Review several weeks ago.  It’s by invite only, but I wrote and told them that they had to give me an account because last September I was emailing tech-savvy friends to ask if anyone could design a service exactly like this.  I was willing to pay for this — like flickr or Mars Edit — but diigo is in fact free.  No one took up my offer back in September, but by cosmic coincidence some electronic engineering professor geek at Berkeley was dreaming about the same thing and designed it.

What it does is this: you read something on the web, you bookmark it using diigo.com (you do need to install a little diigo bookmarklet on the toolbar).  You assign a tag to it (if you want), or several.  Then, you can literally underline the passages that intrigue you, and — this is the cool bit I’ve been waiting for — you can add a “sticky” note (just like on flickr) that associates with the part you’ve just underlined.  When you look at your bookmarks, the list will show you how many annotations you have in each article you’ve bookmarked, and you can then expand that list to show you both the underlined bits as well as your “notes.”

Then she (almost gleefully) notes,

Further, if you are a blogger (which I am no longer, thanks), you can blog your annotated and commented-upon bits directly to your blog.  Or you can badger your friends with your brilliant insights to that last political science article you read by forwarding your diigo-bookmarked articles…  Whatever.

She has a couple dozen beta memberships to give away.  If you want one, drop her a note directly or comment here expressing interest and I’ll pass it on to Yule.

Doc…

Sean…

David…

If a tree false in the foreground…

Would a dolphin culture be this hung-up on brachiation? There’s a cartoon called Frank and Earnest. In a dolphin culture would it be about Flo and Eddy? Wouldn’t the newsprint get all mushy before papa Dolphin had a chance to read it?

In Saussure’s elegant construction of sign and signifier, que signifie le mot “significant?”

Catherine graduated today from Rutgers’ Douglass College. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Catherine had a major somehow more elaborate than just biology and mathematics, but damned if I can recall what it was. Catherine’s senior year was marred by the fear that hers would be the last Douglass class, that the Corzine budget that slashed $170 million from New Jersey higher education would mandate structural changes at Rutgers that would end the college.  A struggle ensued and those who would save Douglass College have won for now.

We sat in the sun from about 9:45 to noon today as speakers shared their experiences and hope for the future.  The hundreds of graduates were called to the platform in alphabetical order.  Ms. Vincent is surname impaired in this type of ordering.  When her name was called though, her family and friends hooted and cheered as loudly and as long as any of the other groups gathered to honor and embarass their graduate.  I took a few great pictures and a lot that will be discarded.  Foolishly I neglected to pack the interface that allows me to upload pictures from the camera to the PC.

Therefore, more later!

Each of the boys called to wish us a happy anniversary.  Makes me happy that they’re so thoughtful.  This week my niece Catherine and my nephew John graduate from college.  I’m proud of both of them.  Examining my face, my shape, in the mirror I find it baffling (but wonderful) that Beth has stuck with a homely guy like me for so long.

We had lunch today at Bahary, a little seafood place in a Palestinian neighborhood in Bay Ridge, Borough of Brooklyn. It was a guy place. Beth was the only woman. The guys spoke Arabic and English, shifting from one to the other with a graceful fluidity that was to envy.

We had been driving on 5th and 6th Avenues in the thirties and forties and we were starving. We moved from Hispanic to Asian to Arabic neighborhoods and everywhere heard the sounds of people speaking in languages not our own. I thought about the redneck consciousness that suggests that these people should somehow hunker down and learn English first, then participate in American life as their language skills improve.

American redneck xenophobia is an ugly thing, and ironic. These folks who would compel immigrants to learn English often don’t talk too good their own selves. “It don’t matter,” I heard a guy say graciously in Detroit this morning when somebody upset his luggage cart. I didn’t stop to quiz him on his attitudes regarding immigrants’ rights to cultural identity under our North American umbrella. Odds are that he doesn’t care one way or the other whether the Asians speak Chinese or the Hispanics speak Spanish. It’s definitely not fair of me to project, to infer ill intentions on the part of every native son too stupid to talk good. Even so, based on my personal knowledge of those camo wearing, beer swilling, Bambi slaying bullies in ball caps I’d venture a guess that the mother tonguers themselves are simply compensating for their own inabilities to speak it.

Jason Leopold, a respected professional journalist, wrote this weekend that an indictment had been issued in the case of just about everybody versus Karl Rove. The Wall Street Journal attacked the reportage implying that Leopold was, after all, only a blogger. Readers were expected to infer that Leopold was no longer respectable nor a reporter based on a quote from Jay Rosen, “a blogger himself.” Now a strict deconstruction and untangling will show that the WSJ servants of capital and corporate greed didn’t actually conflate Leopold’s reporting with bloggaciousness. Instead they relied on a combination of squirrelly editing and/or poor writing to let the reader draw his own conclusions:

Mr. Leopold previously worked for a number of mainstream news organizations.

“The system for keeping unverifiable reports out of the news is totally broken down when you look at the online world,” says Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and a blogger himself at www.pressthink.org. Instead, he says, there is a “let’s see if this holds up” philosophy that he thinks has merit in today’s fast-paced news world, though he admits it isn’t a practice that major news organizations could or should adopt.

Truthout operates on a shoestring, and isn’t what you’d call a capital intensive web publication, but by god their reporting has been practically the only consistently truthful investigative work on-shore since the Bush administration gave American mainstream journalism a hot shot of anthrax in its bindle. Contributions are welcome!

Leopold reported that the indictment had been handed down and that the prosecutor had talked with Rove’s attorney. Rove’s attorney, Luskin, claims to have been off somewhere cutting brush or fishing for jumbo perch or something. Leopold reminds us that Luskin is a liar, and points out that mainstream media would do well to view skeptically any reports from the pathological creatures that crawl the halls of the current administration looking for spiders and rodents on which to feed.

When I read about the indictment and the lengthy conference with the defendant’s attorney, it seemed clear to me that they were cooking something up. Since the indictment, Rove has been free to deliver a talk to the American Enterprise Institute (”Most people don’t understand that we’re doing a heck of a… job”), and the Preznit has sent troops to guard the Mexican border. The dog is wagging big-time.

So who is staying out of jail and how? Certainly I trust Jason Leopold more than Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or even the Preznit (who, after all, did lie about the size of a fish he caught in his little mud hole down in Texas). My sense is that the grand jury came in with a raft of indictments, indictments so broad and deep that the Preznit has declared that they constitute a threat to national security. Now while it is the Preznit’s right to jail Leopold and Fitzgerald, and to hold them incommunicado in this time of war; I suspect rather that he put a national security blockade on the information related to the indictments. That way, the American people can be protected from any knowledge that a grand jury thinks Rove and Cheney should go to trial. If there is a trial, it will be a secret one, and if a jail term is handed down, it will be a secret jail term.

I will feel — we all will feel much better not knowing that the felons in charge have been caught and punished.  In time of war, good news is what’s important, not muck-raking political nonsense.

Not a special treatment from a high priced hooker at the Watergate, although that too, I suppose. But more specifically this morning:

Many countries have right-wing nutjobs as leaders. These leaders often do terrible things, like invading other nations or supporting terrorism. Meanwhile, these countries also have normal people who are extremely critical of their own right-wing nutjob leaders.

When two of these countries with right-wing nutjob leaders come into conflict, the leaders will loudly criticize each other. Often these criticisms are completely accurate. Indeed, they will generally be exactly the same criticism made by the normal people of the country being criticized.

So, Cindy Sheehan accurately criticizes the U.S. for the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. So does Ahmadinejad.

Thanks to Bruce for the link.

This is as dangerous as it gets, Sports Racers. The megalomaniacs-in-charge are faced with criminal indictments this week, as well as a deepening discussion of Lord Cheney’s evil doings. In the run up to a raft of bad publicity, the perch fisherman himself has ordered troops to the border to protect all America from the brown menace to the south.

If, like me, you had an octogenarian father on the email lists of the right wing disinformation artists, you saw this coming. Dad was pumping through lots of jokes about Mexicans plus lots of chain letters that close with the formal request that “God bless America.”

I love my dad, but his inability to use the delete key embarasses the heck out of me. I’ve tried to explain that the racist nonsense he receives from the Friends of Karl is no more than disinformation aimed at distracting us from bad news about the administration. I’ve tried to engage him in conversation regarding my view that the pious platitudes he sends my way are an attempt to organize the credulous among the nominally Christian right in opposition to those of us who would like to pause a moment before unleashing the cancer storm of radioactive poisoning that Bush seems to intend for the world.

This week, look out. If Karl is really being indicted and if Cheney’s complicity in the illegal build-up of false information that led to the war is going to be revealed, well… Bush’s mobilization of the National Guard on the Southern border is going to look a lot like preparation for an Anschluss to our neighbors and the world.

I’m wondering what parts of Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Tamaulipas will be our Sudetenland. How much of Mexico will Bush need to carve off to establish a zone of control and build the camps necessary for containment of the 12 million “illegals” he is sworn to persecute?

Veeblefetzer.

Marcel Proust’s madeleine is the cliché cookie—a highbrow reference that’s penetrated pop culture. - Edmund Levin, Slate (5/11)

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past –
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

- Billy Collins

…I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? - M. Proust

I’m finishing off my complimentary bag of blended dark and medium roast coffee beans from Boca Java, pungently labeled “Blogs of Bravery, the Real Story in Real Time.” Reminds me of the meter of “Sports Racer, What’s your power move?”

Why do the romantic rightists take all the cool blog names? Boots and Sabers… Captain’s Quarters… American Soldier… okay, that last one is an appropriately titled milblog, but still… Occam’s Toothbrush… I wish the left had that kind of inspiration… Power Line… not a left wing blog…

While the left wallows in deep introspection and self improvement, the right advances along a broad rhetorical front that includes claiming the right to be as insulting as necessary to make a point. And yet Ad Hominem, a blog that rightfully should belong to one side or another in the culture wars, belongs instead to the cultured voice of none-other than the Updike character of choice: Rabbit Frenzy.

So perhaps this attempt to read significance into the titles chosen by bloggers is no more than a caffeine fueled conceit. Click the link on the right, order up, and get me some more free coffee. Please.

you live your life as if it’s real

Now to be found on a WordPress blog not too far from your corner liquor store or arab grocery with baklava by the cash register where they’ll make change for your food stamps, sell you Dept. of Agriculture subsidized cigarettes, for real.

I don’t think he brought everything over from Typepad.  I couldn’t find the musical number, “air on a g-string.”  Ah well, to forgive is human, but air’s divine.  Maybe he intends to bring it all forward.  Maybe he has.  Maybe not.  But the sequence itself will be different (*if a sequence can be properly thought to have a self), so I’d hang onto the Typepad link if I were you, until Mena or Queen Ozymandias or someone consigns that content to the bit bucket.