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Sunday, March 6, 2005
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Weblogging
A couple of years ago I covered many of the events in the Denver Municipal Election as an unpaid political junkie with a weblog. I attempted to fill in the gaps in the coverage from the Rocky, the Post and other publications. They do not have enough staff nor would it be economically feasible for them to cover issues in the same detail that bloggers can. I've never claimed to be a "professional journalist" as I don't get paid to do this work. It now appears that First Amendment rights may not protect what I write here. I'm dazed and confused over this issue.
Dan Gillmor writes, "Apple Computer's disgusting attack on three online journalism sites, in a witch hunt to find out who (if anyone) inside the company leaked information about allegedly upcoming products, has taken a nasty turn. Too bad it's not surprising -- and journalists of all kinds should be paying attention."
7:39:44 AM 
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Iraq
Juan Cole: "Zogby international found that in late February the percentage of Americans who felt that the Iraq War was worth the cost plummeted by 20 percent."
7:24:55 AM
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Google
Steve Gillmor: "So just when everybody thinks there is no new Borg, along comes Larry, Moe, and Sergey to take over the show. The thing that[base ']s making me angry is not that history is repeating itself, but that stupidity is repeating itself. How hard is it to realize that delivering a service that makes users feel powerless is not a good thing. Particularly users with loaded weapons called blogs and 'casts. Who cares if you can do it because. Forget the stuff about do no evil. Do no stupid." Thanks to Dave Winer for the link.
Tim Bray: "But, it doesn't matter that much because AutoLink is actually kind of useless and anyhow, the Google Toolbar is doomed." Thanks to Doc Searls for the link.
7:14:10 AM
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Social Security
Here's the first of a series of editorials about Social Security from the Denver Post [March 6, 2005, "Problems, politics of Social Security"]. They write, "Social Security is part of America's social "safety net" - structured to pay higher returns to low-paid workers than to high-paid ones. According to The Century Foundation, the benefits of an average-wage earner with a spouse who retired at age 65 in 2004 were about 63 percent of his or her average earnings. But Social Security replaces 85 percent of past earnings for low-wage earners. Benefits for high-wage earners typically replace just 45 percent of their income. Thus, high-income workers might do better with private accounts, but low-wage workers would almost certainly fare better by sticking with Social Security."
7:00:25 AM
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2004 Presidential Transition
Here's a column written by John Aloysius Farrell in today's Denver Post about U.S. Senator Ken Salazar, his centrist and moderate credentials, and how things may play out with regard to federal judicial nominees [March 6, 2005, "Sound, fury await centrist Salazar"]. He writes, "In fact, the federal judiciary is largely a creature of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. A formidable majority (456) of the 835 federal judges were appointed by chief executives named Bush, Nixon, Ford or Reagan. Of those 835 judges, 0 were appointed by a president who wasn't Republican or hailed from outside the South, the nation's most conservative region. That's 0, as in zero, as in none. And though the federal judiciary is getting more diverse, 60 percent of those judges are white guys: not your most radical, underprivileged demographic group. Sure, there are a few liberal judges who hold extreme views, just as there is a conservative Supreme Court justice - Clarence Thomas - who believes in the unconventional notion that the Second Amendment means exactly what it says about the rights of Americans to bear arms. But by the time Bush leaves office, Republicans are likely to have appointed more than two-thirds of the federal bench. If anyone should be screaming about an unbalanced judiciary, it's the Democrats. For the right, it's not enough. The Senate approved 95 percent of Bush's first-term nominees to the federal bench, yet he and his party now want to steamroll Democratic opposition to the sliver of nominees who were rejected."
6:48:29 AM
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© Copyright 2009 John Orr.
Last update: 3/14/09; 7:22:15 PM.
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