Sick Transit

Yes, it really is a city. No, we don’t all grow potatoes here.

But I’ve got to admit, we don’t really have big-city airport security:

Early this month I wrote about the Justice Department’s attempts to classify Supreme Court quotations in the National Security Letter case.

Now a ruling on the merits is in, and the ACLU has prevailed. I haven’t had a chance to read the whole decision yet, but here is the meat:

Of course, this is only the District Court, and there are plenty of appeals ahead. But at least the forces of sanity have a heard start.

Rolling Stone interviews Bruce Springsteen with a full rim job. Cynicism aside, I think that the Boss hits straight on the biggest problem with musicians in politics:

That said, I’m glad he chose to speak up this election. But I hope he doesn’t make a habit of it.

Ex-commie Billmon (currently earning his bread working for some some unidentified faction of the Global Capitalist Conspiracy) rants in the LAT that blogging is being co-opted by big media, just like rock-and-roll, the 60’s, and everything else good and pure:

But the blogging world has always been driven by the media news-cycle. Andrew Sullivan was a media whore before he ever started his blog. Instapundit, the granddaddy of independent bloggers, started life as a Frayster, commenting on articles in MSN’s Slate. (Ironically, he is now part of the Microsoft empire himself.) And sites like Indymedia and WorldnetDaily have taken over for fringe zines, talk radio, and the like.

If Billmon is really convinced that the blogosphere is going to Wall Street in a handbasket, his solution should be to jump back into the fray himself, not to pick up his ball and go home. (He is an awesome writer.) But his vision of a blogosphere not obsessed with the latest news cycles is just nostalgic myth-making.

(link via Yglesias)

NYT Magazine finally does a blogger story, written by a reporter who followed the bloggers around during the National Conventions. It is pretty patronizing, describing how bloggers “over-simplify” issues and trying to explain why people prefer blogs to the “nonideological” media. (Really!) But it has some priceless descriptions of bloggers’ styles. First, Kaus:

Josh Marshall:

And finally, Wonkette:

I also discovered, reading the article, that Wonkette used to write for Suck.com. I may just have to give her another try, out of Suck nostalgia.

Andrew Sullivan goes all 1950 on Teresa Heinz Kerry, quoting a column that bashes her for “emasculating” her husband with her wealth and the Heinz name. According to Sullivan, she’s “a walking embarrassment.”

Kind of reminds you of how, earlier in the campaign, the media–including many female reporters–criticized Judy Steinberg Dean for pursuing her medical practice instead of campaigning with her husband.

Our culture still has a prejudice against strong, independent women; and especially in conservative areas, that could be an electoral liability. There’s no shame in pointing that out. But can’t the “liberal” media at least avoid joining the tongue-clucking?

It’s almost enough to make a guy a feminist.

Thou shalt not take children from parents, and parents from children. It is an abomination.

Since the link requires registration, here are some excerpts:

The murderers of Matthew Shepard tried to claim, at one point, that they were driven to their crime because Shepard made sexual advances to them.

It’s nice to know that Jimmy Swaggart agrees with that argument.

(link via Secular Blasphemy)

First, Good Times came about, and sysadmins and tech-savvy friends had to explain to non-techie users that you can’t actually get a virus just from reading an e-mail.

Then of course, we were proven wrong.

So we had to go back again, and explain that you can only get a virus from certain file types, such as PIFs or EXEs or DOCs.

And now comes the JPEG bug.

It’s almost like Microsoft is trying to prove paranoia true.

As Andrew Sullivan becomes as shrill against Bush as he once was for him, he has now descended to approvingly quoting Kitty Kelley, the author of a mudslinging hatchet-job (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor) about the Bush family, comparing the Bushes to the Sopranos.

Just stop and think about the new one Sullivan would have ripped Kelley (and her Guardian interviewers) a mere few months ago.

I’m glad that Andrew has switched sides, because he’ll probably carry some conservatives with him. But the hypocrisy is just breathtaking.

Jan Haugland has a good overview of the case of the forged National Guard memos.

Frankly, I was surprised at the degree of coverage the media gave to the memos; the holes in Bush’s Guard service are not news. Jan attributes this to “a combination of bias and incompetence”; but I don’t think it’s pure anti-Bush bias.

I think that this was in large part a reaction to the whole Swift Boat Vets fiasco. The media allowed themselves to be grossly manipulated by the Vets, who just ran a few small ad buys with a smear campaign, and let the major news outlets broadcast the charges far and wide.

So, in their typical myopic definition of balance, the commercial broadcasters jumped at the opportunity to balance a shaky story about Kerry with a shaky story about Bush. If the Siwft Boat Vets hadn’t been attacking Kerry, this probably would have been dismissed as old news–or scrutinized more heavily.

Michael Moore has decided that rather than submitting Fahrenheit 9/11 for the Best Documentary Oscar, he will focus on Best Picture instead. His rationale:

In other words… Moore realized that his work of fiction stands no chance against real documentaries, and so he’s not going to expose himself to the humilliation of losing.

What I’d like to know is how first-year UCLA law students react to a list that of business referrals from their professor that includes a shooting range.

Maureen Dowd has a great name for Bush: The Manichean Candidate.

I’m not sure what Kerry’s philosophical name would be. Perhaps the Zen Candidate, since every question has two answers.

There hasn’t been much rhetoric in the general election about the Patriot Act, perhaps because John Kerry voted for it. But in case we needed any reminders about the Act itself or the frightening government mentality it represents, here is an ACLU page listing portions of the ACLU’s legal filings that the Justice Department tried to gag.

The scariest example is the ACLU’s letter to the court protesting some of the DoJ’s redactions. We are not merely dealing with the redaction of confidential details, but of legal arguments; e.g. this paragraph:

So if the government has its way, we will not only not be allowed to know what the government does not want us to know, but we will not be allowed to know what legal basis the government gave for not allowing us to know!

However, lest you have any lingering belief that there might be a good reason for the redactions, consider this passage from the same letter:

A well-turned piece of rhetoric from a thirty-year-old Supereme Court decision. The only problem? The government attempted to redact the part in parentheses.

Yes, that’s right; the government moved to redact a quote from a Supreme Court opinion.

Do you trust those jokers to decide what you need to know? Because I sure as hell don’t.

(link via Marginal Revolution)

In today’s odd legal news (report by Orrin Kerr @ Volokh), a panel of the Ninth Circuit has held that paying for two months’ membership (at $20/month) at a child porn site does not constitute probable cause to believe that the subscriber possesses child porn.

I am not joking; read the opinion for yourself.

Remarkably, this piece of looniness was actually decided unanimously by the three-judge panel. I expect that even the Ninth Circuit will reverse en banc, however.

Republicans have been claiming for the past year that, despite Bush’s missteps, he’s still the best man to lead the war on terror because he has the right principles, understands the nature of the threat, etc. William Saletan has the best response I’ve ever seen to those claims:

Can’t think of a better thing to say to a conservative.