Wednesday, July 24, 2002

Files: Bush Knew Firm's Plight Before Stock Sale As a businessman in 1990, George W. Bush was deluged with confidential information about the financial plight of a Texas oil company before he sold the majority of his holdings and triggered a federal investigation, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records. [Daypop Top 40] 9:29:10 PM

Mercury News | 07/20/2002 | Dan Gillmor: Hollywood, tech make suspicious pairing [Daypop Top 40] 9:26:45 PM

The K Chronicles. Dear world: Sorry about all this. Most of us didn't vote for him...But even the folks who did are starting to regret it. [Salon.com] 9:24:48 PM

Tom Ridge wants U.S. military for domestic law enforcement. According to this article, Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge called for congress to repeal a law that prohibits the use of military for law enforcement to further the agenda of the "war on terrorism." Ridge later backtracked after angering the public, but President Bush still backs the idea. [kuro5hin.org] 9:04:16 PM

Office of Homeland Securities. If we really want justice in corporate America, we'll have to do it the hard way. It's time for accountants to bear arms. [Salon.com] 9:03:42 PM

USA Today: Royalty fees killing most Internet radio stations. On June 20, a copyright appeals board set a rate of seven-hundredths of a cent per song, per listener. For many stations, run by music fans for music fans, that works out to thousands of dollars more than they make. [Tomalak's Realm] 8:59:34 PM

Ex-Microserf Schmidt as govt cyberterror Cassandra. Apocalypse soon [The Register] 8:58:49 PM

"How Bush made his millions." What kills the President is that every time Harken comes up, Democrats get to retell the story of how he made his money. And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having "earned" a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest day[base ']s work in his life. [Daypop Top 40] 8:57:51 PM

Joe Conason's Journal. In times of trouble, the Greens gather to gloat. And how WorldCom woes were laid out last year -- but dismissed by a Republican judge with deep ties to the party. Plus: Is Bush granting federal favors to Florida to help his brother? [Salon.com] 6:44:22 PM

Lawmakers Seek Rules to Stop Redistribution of Digital TV. Congress is urging the F.C.C. to intervene in a dispute between the entertainment and technology industries over how to prevent the redistribution of digital broadcasts over the Internet. [New York Times: Technology] Oh, yeah, let's have the experts weigh in... 6:39:39 PM

Invisible hand or dead hand? Tonight's Salon cover story surveys economists and other experts on the pressing question: What should President Bush do about the cratering markets and becalmed economy? We know Bush's own prescription: He wants to lower taxes for the wealthy further, to stand by his bizarrely disoriented Secretary of the Treasury (who told reporters, according to Bloomberg News, "I'm constantly amazed that anybody cares what I do"), and take a monthlong vacation at his ranch. As the New York Times' Paul Krugman keeps reminding us, Bush's economic plan has remained unchanged from 1999 -- when the economy looked, ahem, very different. This is known as the "dead hand on the tiller" approach, and it usually leads to a nasty collision. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 6:01:43 PM

Library Journal: Copyright in the Balance. Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. We need to be much more aggressive in calling people on this rhetoric, because it's just wrong. It's just not the case that copyright has ever been understood to mean that if you use a copyrighted work in a way unintended by the copyright owner that's "theft." [Tomalak's Realm] 5:57:06 PM

Bush's role in corporate fraud Bush claims to see nothing wrong about Harken's frauds. Bush is also wrong on the accounting. This was a deliberately complicated transaction for the same reason that Enron's and Lincoln Savings's partnerships were complicated. Complexity makes it hard for regulators to discern fraud. While the transaction was complicated, the underlying fraud is so well known that the accounting rules governing such transactions are not vague. There was no "honest dispute" about accounting rules. There was a deliberate fraud structured in a complicated manner in order to claim that it wasn't really deliberate. [Daypop Top 40] 5:56:18 PM

Two years ago I wrote that Microsoft's .NET scheme was vaporware. Today Rebecca Buckman in the Wall Street Journal reports that, basically, it still is. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 5:45:50 PM

License to Hack: Black Hats win.. A pair of tame Hollywood Congressmen are preparing to introduce federal legislation which, if passed, would not only give copyright holders license to hack your PC but also shields them from lawsuits and penalties if they screw things up and delete, say, your last five years of tax returns, or that novel you've been working on. This is not only a Good Thing, this is a Great Thing! [kuro5hin.org] 5:42:54 PM

A doctor's right to choose. Two surgical options for late-term abortion may be reduced to one if antiabortion activists, with help from the Bush administration, get their way. [Salon.com] 5:39:45 PM

Joe Conason's Journal. A hearing goes poorly, and prospects dim for a Bush nominee. Plus: Ann Coulter, foiled again! [Salon.com] 8:52:11 AM

Could Hollywood hack your PC?. Congress is preparing to consider a proposal that would authorize copyright holders to disable PCs used for illicit file trading--a step critics say amounts to vigilante justice. [CNET News.com] 8:40:53 AM

U.K. government backs open source. The open-source movement gets a boost as the U.K. embraces its software as a secure way for government agencies to avoid getting locked into proprietary products and technologies. [CNET News.com] Signs of light after all. Just so you don't think I only post bad news... ;-) 8:40:06 AM

A $34 million "political payoff". President Bush's decision to gut U.N. family-planning funds will appease right-wing hard-liners -- at a cost of thousands of lives. [Salon.com] 8:37:59 AM

What the world thinks of America. Yes, they hate our power and envy our wealth and respect our ideals. But it's deeper -- and more personal -- than that. [Salon.com] 8:37:37 AM

The Politics of Power. The latest edition of Policy Review contains an excellent article examining the widening perceptual and ideological rift that exists between The United States and Europe on matters of power -- political, economic, and military -- and the means of exercising it. It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power -- the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power -- American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant's "Perpetual Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. [kuro5hin.org] 8:34:36 AM

© Copyright 2003 Michael Alderete.