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Friday, October 28, 2005
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Great post on Bush & Nixon.
So, here we are, waiting to see if there are indictments of White House officials. What will Bush and the "conservative movement" do if the PlameGate, Abramoff, DeLay, Reed and/or other crime/corruption investigations finally threaten to bring down the Bush Presidency -- along with Republican control of the House and Senate?
(Via .)
9:08:01 PM 
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Washington, D.C. – Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid released the following statement.
“These are very serious charges. They suggest that a senior White House aide put politics ahead of our national security and the rule of law.
“This case is bigger than the leak of highly classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president.
“It's now time for President Bush to lead and answer the very serious questions raised by this investigation. The American people have already paid too steep a price as a result of misconduct at the White House, and they deserve better.”
(Via Seeing the Forest.)
9:05:23 PM
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Nick Denton - That New York Observer profile:
There is no Gawker Media newsroom. The writers are freelance contractors, paid a base rate per posting and bonuses for drawing traffic.
They rise early and post throughout the day, following scheduled quotas. When they take a vacation, guest bloggers are brought in to keep the factory lines running on time.
"Writing Gawker," said co-editor Jessica Coen, "there's no way I'd have time to read something like Gawker, the way people do."
Mr. Denton's managing editor, Lockhart Steele, is largely charged with making sure the copy flow goes uninterrupted.
"You know The New York Times is going to be on your newsstand every morning," Mr. Steele said. Gawker Media operates on the same principle, replacing amateur bloggers' intermittent, as-the-mood-strikes postings with a steady, predictable feed.
A solid profile of Gawker's Nick Denton. Notice that the format, the blog, is new, but the process is similar to that used in any publishing organization.
Technorati Tags: blogging, Denton, Media, media economics, publishing
(Via RatcliffeBlog—Mitch's Open Notebook.)
8:58:10 PM
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Dabble looks pretty interesting:
We’re calling it Dabble, with emphasis on the Db: it’s a database system for dabblers. We’d naturally be happy if professional developers, DBAs, and business analysts find our system useful, but we won’t be satisfied until we have something that works for everyone in the millions of small businesses and teams for whom data management is purely a sideline, a necessary evil of doing whatever line of work they’re really in.
But more than that: Dabble is for everyone that wants to experiment with their data, evolve it, explore it, improve it incrementally and interactively. We like to think that Dabble is to most database systems as finger paints or plasticine are to granite and chisel: something that lets you stick your hands in your data, roll it around, play with it, and most importantly, never set in stone.
(Via Life of a one-man IT department.)
8:23:12 PM
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Nat Hentoff nails the issues that were really scary about both Roberts and Miers, and why we should be fearful of any Bush SCOTUS nominee. When in presidential power over the last 25 years, the Republicans have been intent on increasing the power of the president, while decreasing his accountability. Both Robers and Miers are in that tradition.
Harriet Miers's withdrawal from her nomination to the Supreme Court may
repair some of the serious cracks in part of Bush's Republican base,
but the largely overlooked key reason she should not have been the
"swing vote" on the Court—as Sandra Day O'Connor was—remains. A basic
criterion for Bush's next nominee will be his or her willingness to
defer to the president's self-assumed authority, as commander in chief,
to conduct the war on terrorism as he—along with Donald Rumsfeld and
Dick Cheney—sees fit.
Read the rest of Hentoff. The danger of a too-powerful executive is tangible and growing.
4:04:20 PM
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In this week's newsletter, Bob Park includes this fantastic phrase:
EVOLUTION: THE DISCOVERY INSTITUTE DID WHAT SCIENCE COULD NOT.
The question of "how we know" is being asked on the pages of the
daily news for the first time since the 1925 Scopes trial, thanks
to the Discovery Institute. With the world beset by religious
wars, this is an opportunity for people to see that no wars are
fought over science. Scientific disputes can be settled only by
better evidence. "It's too complex to see how it could happen
without magic" is not going to get you far. Meanwhile, Harvard
announced plans to study the hardest question of all, the origin
of life. And right at ground-zero, the University of Kansas
Natural History Museum will open an evolution exhibit on Nov 1. Emphasis mine. Wars are fought using the products of science, but not over science. The backers of gradualism in geology didn't kill anyone who thought plate tectonics was the right model to describe things. Nobody has tortured because of the big bang.It's only the forces of superstition and mindless belief that feel they have to kill their opponents to prevail.
3:42:20 PM
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This stuff going on in Iran is pretty shameful. One thing it does, though, is totally disprove the Bush/neocon vision of "democracy" ushering in an era of peace in Western Asia. Ahmadinejad was voted into office by 62% of the Iranian electorate.
TENS of thousands of Iranians staged anti-Israel protests across the
country today, repeating the calls by their president for the Jewish
state's destruction.
World leaders have condemned remarks made by President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who repeated the words of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, founder of Iran's Islamic revolution, by saying: "Israel must
be wiped off the map."
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has voiced his "dismay" at the
pronouncement. In a rare rebuke, Mr Annan reminded Iran that, as a UN
signatory, it had undertaken not to threaten the use of force against
another state.
10:14:04 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 11/1/2005; 9:47:54 PM.
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