Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Knight Ridder Digital's Dick van Halsema is blogging. 5:05:24 PM    comment []

Tulsa paper threatens to sue blogger over posting excerpts of its stories and links to its site. Tulsa paper needs to get a clue. Blogger Michael Bates: "I believe I have respected the World's copyrights within the fair-use exemption. Let the World name the specific articles in which it alleges that I have exceeded fair use. I have violated no law by directing readers to the Tulsa World's own website to read the Tulsa World's own content as the World itself presents it." Hmm. Is this a job for the Media Bloggers Association? 5:03:18 PM    comment []

Garry Trudeau broke his collarbone while skiing in Aspen. I skied there with the Doonesbury scribe while reporting a profile on him a few years ago, and I can tell you he's a good skier, so I'm totally buying his story about an errant ski-instructor wiping him out. 4:47:19 PM    comment []

Max Boot picks apart the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and picks up on Eric Muller's investigation of author Thomas Woods' secessionist sympathies. 4:26:15 PM    comment []

N&R business blog. Significant. The print edition has a small business section, this should allow much more coverage of local stories. Also significant: JR says, "I've told the writers that it's OK to link out to business stories on other sites, even of local competitors." That should help N&R readers, and boost the BizJournal, too. 4:21:21 PM    comment []

Terry Teachout comes not to praise Arthur Miller but to bury him: "He pretended to have big ideas and the ability to express them with a touch of poetry, when in fact he had neither." 12:11:29 PM    comment []

The other night at dinner, Lisa said there must be some kind of source document to which the Bush administration's Social Security strategy can be traced. Here's one candidate, the 1983 Cato Institute paper, Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy. From the article: "The second main element in our strategy involves what one might crudely call guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it." There is some good advice for Bush: "It would be self-defeating to lay down a rigid blueprint and blindly adhere to it." Of course, opposition to Social Security goes back to the creation of the program: "Conservatives started complaining that the system was a big-government boondoggle doomed to insolvency before the first check was sent out in January 1937. Their indictment has been part of conservative ideology ever since Barry Goldwater, whose doomed but defiant 1964 presidential campaign made him the father of the modern conservative movement, through Bush." Ideology as much as economics seem to be a constant issue. From FDR advisor Rexford Tugwell: "The idea that the federal government had any responsibility at all for the welfare of individual citizens was still very strange to many people....Belief in free enterprise was something close to a religion for the American people." 12:03:30 PM    comment []

I've been worried about Duke fans for a while now, and ACC Hoops says the concern is spreading. "Hey, Dookie V, look at us, we're Crazies!" 11:05:57 AM    comment []

More St. James in the N&R, in print and by blog, and at Hoggard's. Linda Shaw vs Skip Alston is a heavyweight bout -- much more satisfying than Skip vs the City staff. 10:33:38 AM    comment []

Anton Zuiker has Triangle conference followup. Strong blogging communities in Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham should help tie Greensboro more closely to that vibrant area of North Carolina. Not quite a replacement for the textile industry, but definitely a blogging-derived positive for our city. 10:29:59 AM    comment []

Dave Winer has some thoughts on newspaper and community blogging, and observations from Spartanburg. 10:19:19 AM    comment []

Krugman: "Mr. Dean is squarely in the center of his party on issues like health care and national defense. Instead, Mr. Dean's political rejuvenation reflects the new ascendancy within the party of fighting moderates, the Democrats who believe that they must defend their principles aggressively." But...the media told me that Dean's a radical lefty...doesn't he, like, scream and stuff? Even the N&R ran a scowling fist-clenched picture of him this week when he got the DNC job...darn liberal media. 7:43:50 AM    comment []