31 January 2006 @ 12:29AM >> The one story that can unite conspiracy theorists on the right and the left.

30 January 2006 @ 5:37PM >> Google recently modified their official statement on censorship, SayAnything reports. In the wake of Google’s deal to censor content on behalf of the communist Chinese government, the self-proclaimed Don’t Be Evil company is no longer able to stand behind this statement:

Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results.

And with a swift deletion and a quick save, Google revises its principles.

28 January 2006 @ 11:25AM >> Google has been taking a lot of flak, rightfully so, for censoring search results to satisfy the Chinese communist dictatorship.

The search engine is placing notices on each page notifying users that items have been censored at the request of the Chinese government, so it isn’t quite as bad as Microsoft’s actions to placate the Chinese, which include taking down entire websites without notice, rendering them inaccessible to the entire world. Google’s censorship applies only to the version of the search engine aimed at the Chinese market. Still, for a company whose motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” the action is at best hypocritical, and it shows the slogan to be nothing more than empty P.R. sermonizing.

The simplest illustration of the moral compromise made by the Don’t Be Evil company comes from Jonah Goldberg, who recommends searching for “Tiananmen” on Chinese Google and comparing that to the results from the uncensored Google. That’s right, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, an inconvenient historical fact for the repressive Chinese regime, has gone down the memory hole thanks to the good folks at Google.

I’ve refined the search a bit for an even starker contrast. Here’s what comes up in the standard Google image search for “Tiananmen Square Massacre”, and here’s the scrubbed version on Chinese Google.

What makes Google’s actions even more hypocritical is that, just a week before this Google flap erupted, the company was hailed by privacy advocates for refusing to turn over to the U.S. Justice Department aggregate data on searches for child pornography. What a brave stand!

So Google has the backbone to rebuff to the U.S. government’s attempts to fight child porn, but the Don’t Be Evil company is willing to help China continue to repress its people by erasing moments from history like the Tiananmen Square massacre.

---

Update: Google’s blocks on certain words can apparently be avoided by a little creative misspelling.

27 January 2006 @ 7:15AM >> Last fall, The Times of London ran a profile discussing my film project covering the political correctness on college campuses. I just got an electronic copy of the text and have now posted it online.

27 January 2006 @ 6:42AM >> Robert Kuttner at Tapped, the weblog of The American Prospect, assesses the cause of today’s hyper-partisanship:

What has really happened in recent years, however, is a shift by tightly disciplined Republicans to the hard right, while Democrats have become more moderate and centrist.

26 January 2006 @ 9:45AM >> It looks like the terrorist group Hamas has won a majority in yesterday’s parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories.

While it is obviously not good that terrorism is now the official policy of the Palestinian Authority, in a way, this simplifies Israel’s task of dealing with the Palestinians. After spending most of his life as a unapologetic terrorist, former Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat started renouncing the tactic publicly while still enabling and encouraging it privately. He even won a Nobel Peace Prize for signing a peace agreement that he never actually implemented and probably never intended to. All the while, his Palestinian Authority funneled money to terrorist groups and encouraged attacks on Israel. Such duplicity complicated matters for Israel, because the rest of the world insisted that the Israelis cut deals with a man who never lived up to any of them.

At least now, it’s plain for everyone to see where the Palestinians stand on the issue of terrorism. They’ve embraced it publicly and wholeheartedly. It just became a lot more difficult for the rest of the world to insist that Israel give away more land and security in the hopes of achieving a peace that the Palestinian Authority now, as a matter of official policy, has no intention of granting.

A low-insensity war has persisted for years, and it continues because the Palestinian side is too weak to achieve total victory and the Israelis have been held back by the rest of the world. If the Hamas victory leads to an upturn in violence—and it’s hard to imagine that it won’t—then the world will have no more excuses for trying to prevent Israel from fighting back vigorously. This election means that the world’s handcuffs are now off Israel.

The question is, now that Hamas is the establishment, will they be willing to sacrifice their newfound power and the luxuries that come with it in order to wage a war they’re not likely to win?

26 January 2006 @ 9:10AM >> Saddam Hussein:

[L]awyers for Saddam Hussein Wednesday distributed copies of a lawsuit against President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair for destroying Iraq.

25 January 2006 @ 4:32AM >> This seems to dispel the notion that Afghanistan or Iraq could rightly be considered a quagmire:

Iraqis and Afghans are among the most optimistic people in the world when it comes to their economic future, a new survey for the BBC suggests.

[...]

In Afghanistan, 70% say their own circumstances are improving, and 57% believe that the country overall is on the way up.

In Iraq, 65% believe their personal life is getting better, and 56% are upbeat about the country’s economy.

People aren’t going to be optimistic about their economic future if their country is sliding into chaos. They’re going to be optimistic if they’re noticing improvements. So it seems interesting to note that we Americans—informed by our media yet thousands of miles away—are far more pessimistic about Afghanistan and Iraq than the people who actually live there.

24 January 2006 @ 10:22AM >> Even though the Republicans have held Congress for over a decade and the White House for the past 5 years, the left is still succeeding at using government to redistribute wealth. So argues Patrick Chisholm in this editorial:

During the first five years of President Bush’s presidency, nondefense discretionary spending (i.e., spending decided on an annual basis) rose 27.9 percent, far more than the 1.9 percent growth during President Clinton’s first five years, according to the libertarian Reason Foundation. And according to Citizens Against Government Waste, the number of congressional “pork barrel” projects under Republican leadership during fiscal 2005 was 13,997, more than 10 times that of 1994.

Discretionary spending is dwarfed by mandatory spending - spending that cannot be changed without changing the laws. Shifting demographics combined with an inability to change those laws virtually ensures that, through programs such as Social Security and Medicare, America’s workers will be forced to redistribute a larger and larger portion of their income to other Americans in the coming decades.

[...]

Certain trends have been favoring the left for the past several decades. In the early 1960s, transfer payments (entitlements and welfare) constituted less than a third of the federal government’s budget. Now they constitute almost 60 percent of the budget, or about $1.4 trillion per year. Measured according to this, the US government’s main function now is redistribution: taking money from one segment of the population and giving it to another segment. In a few decades, transfer payments are expected to make up more than 75 percent of federal government spending.

[...]

The left has a powerful institutional force on its side: “public choice” economics. Our system of government is highly responsive to vocal groups that lobby for subsidies, government programs, and other special favors. Since the costs are spread out among all taxpayers while the benefits are concentrated among smaller segments of the population (such as retirees, in the case of Social Security and Medicare), the taxpayers have much less of an incentive to lobby against the measure while the beneficiaries have a huge incentive to lobby for it. Whenever those subsidies are threatened, the lobbies launch their barrages of politically effective complaints.

Forces favoring the left are virtually locked in. Even with Republicans in control, big government is destined to get a lot bigger.

This raises the question: for free-market conservatives, what’s the point of voting Republican anymore?

For decades, the Republican party has benefited from a fragile coalition of economic conservatives and social conservatives. These are two distinct groups that don’t necessarily have much in common aside from their shared disdain for the politics of the left.

For the time being, Republicans will probably be saved by the propensity of Democrats to remain embarrassingly weak on matters of national security. But that issue can be taken off the table if the Democrats nominate a foreign policy hawk (unlikely) or if the American public perceives less of a threat than they do now (possible, assuming American soil continues to remain free from attack). If economic conservatives sit at home during future elections, the Republican party will feel the pain of ignoring their roots. And if that happens, social conservatives will suffer as well.

For the health of the conservative movement, the Republicans in Congress better wake up soon. There are very many people who won’t bother showing up on election day if the choice is between one party of government and the other party of government.

22 January 2006 @ 12:41PM >> In response to the story that the British government pays for multiple sex change operations for indecisive Britons, reader Scot Walker e-mails:

Let’s pretend that I think I’m a dog trapped in a man’s body — what is the treatment for that? Do they give me an operation and attach floppy ears and a tail on me so I can be what “I really am”? Or do they treat me for a mental disorder?

By the way, San Francisco’s tax payers have to pay for sex change operations of city government employees. It costs around $50K, if I remember correctly.

20 January 2006 @ 6:19PM >> Recently, Mayor Ray Nagin declared that New Orleans would be a “chocolate city.” However, as the Borowitz Report website indicates, Nagin’s wish for a chocolate city may not be possible:

Days after the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, predicted that New Orleans would soon be a “chocolate city” again, the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) poured cold water on those plans, arguing that building a city out of chocolate was “unfeasible.”

Harland DeBellis, a spokesperson for the USACE, said that the agency had given plans for a city constructed entirely out of chocolate the thumbs down only after engineers painstakingly built a scale model of New Orleans out of Hershey’s bars and found the results “problematic.”

“If the existing levees in New Orleans were breached by the flood waters of Katrina, imagine how much worse they would have been if they had been made out of chocolate,” Mr. DeBellis said at a press briefing in Washington today. “Chocolate is simply not a suitable building material.”

20 January 2006 @ 4:10PM >> Commenter Brian DeSpain takes me to task at the On The Fence Films website over my Consumer Advocates at UCLA post from Wednesday, which was also cross-posted here. Brian says, “What’s a nice spin is how you gloss over what actually provoked those comments.” Since he raises some interesting points, I wanted to link to it here and include my response:

Brian,

I don’t believe I was spinning anything; I linked to the original article and to the site so that readers could make up their own minds. I still don’t believe that pointing out the classroom environment and political leanings of professors amounts to “reactionary” “McCarthyism,” “right-wing propaganda” and an “abhorrent” “witch hunt,” which is what is being charged about the Bruin Alumni Association.

That said, professors are free to hold whatever views they like, and they’re free to engage in any political activities outside the classroom that they wish. Those views and activities should not adversely affect their careers. They should not be fired or otherwise punished for their views or for their out-of-class activities. Nobody is calling for that, to my knowledge, nor should they.

But in an environment where professors overwhelmingly hold one worldview, it is relevant, because a lack of intellectual diversity means that students are being short-changed. Even the most conscientious professor is unable to present opposing viewpoints as convincingly as someone who actually believes them and understands their intricacies. And when professors go off on political rants in classes where it has nothing to do with the subject matter, students are being deprived of class time that should be spent on the topic that was advertised in the course handbook.

Perhaps you feel that the Bruin website conflates these two issues, and perhaps you believe that they are presenting their argument in a muddled fashion. Fair enough; several people have made that criticism, and I can see that point. But is it McCarthyism? When did expressing an opinion in this country become the same thing as leading a witch-hunt?

At least the members of the Bruin Alumni Association are expressing their opinions without charging anyone tens of thousands of dollars for it in some sort of educational bait-and-switch, which is what happens all too often on campus these days.

If anything, the exaggerated reaction of the professors simply serves to underscore the extremism that the Bruin Alumni Association is pointing out. Professors are not above criticism, and by comparing this criticism to McCarthyism, these professors are attempting to elevate themselves to a privileged status where they can spout whatever opinions they want—while billing other people for the time—without anyone ever disagreeing publicly. Sorry, but that doesn’t wash with me.

Thanks for taking the time to share your comments. I appreciate that you did so in a civil, reasoned fashion. I wish these professors would follow your example.

Hope all is well,
Evan

Update: UCLA graduate Gina Cobb has some additional thoughts:

The majority of the professors are politically neutral or at least fair-minded in their teaching approach, and generally stick to their course content. However, some of the professors are off-the-charts radical, liberal, socialist, collectivist and Marxist. That alone would not be a problem (the professors are entitled to believe whatever they want), but they force the entire class to listen to and parrot back their extreme politics. It’s not fair to students.

I had one professor who was so liberal that in writing down the name of the class on my notes one day I absent-mindedly wrote “Socialism” instead of the real course title, “Torts.” Socialism is what we were actually discussing just about every day.

[...]

The problem is professors who make courses having nothing to do with politics into venues for imposing their own political point of view on students.

[...]

The main thing I learned was how to “toe the line” — how to say whatever the person holding the Power of the Grade wanted to hear. This is actually a useful skill for the real world. However, since the reason that I was taking these courses was not to learn how to conform to anything, however unreasonable, but rather to learn specific subject matter and to sharpen my academic skills of research and writing, I would say that I lost more than I gained from the experience.

This new attempt by UCLA alumni to identify professors who go overboard in injecting politics into their courses isn’t a “witch hunt.” It’s an attempt to gather evidence and to rein in the professors who have gone way off the deep end in how they teach their classes. To grumble that the alumni group should not be willing to pay students for notes or tape recordings documenting the abuse is to focus on a detail about methodology in the hopes of distracting from the need for the overall effort. If the notes and tapes are handed over without payment, will that make the critics happy? (Answer: No.)

What the critics of this new effort and the fans of academic freedom need to think about is what they would consider a reasonable response if a university had a large number of its professors using their courses to promote fascism, as opposed to socialism. At some point, it would be reasonable to say, “Enough is enough. Teach what we are paying you to teach.”

18 January 2006 @ 3:24PM >> If you bought a car only to discover that it came with no passenger door, you might be upset, and rightfully so. You paid for a full car and got something less than that. And if you banded together with other consumers who have been ripped off the same way, you’d be hailed as a consumer hero.

Most cars cost far less than four years at college, which now averages over $100,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree. Yet, like the car that comes with a major part missing, many colleges provide educations that are unbalanced and incomplete. Sometimes, you might sign up for an English class only to find out that it is really a class on politics. (This happened to me in a freshman English class at Bucknell.)

An alumni group at UCLA, the Bruin Alumni Association, is fighting back against such consumer rip-offs by letting the public know which professors are inappropriately injecting politics into the classroom:

“We’re just trying to get people back on a professional level of things. Having been a student myself up until 2003, and then watching what other students like myself have gone through, I’m very concerned about the level of professional teaching at UCLA,” said [former UCLA student Andrew] Jones, who said he is supporting himself with a modest salary from the organization and is its only full-time employee.

Needless to say, some professors are upset that alumni and students are demanding that professors perform the job function for which they’re being paid:

“Any sober, concerned citizen would look at this and see right through it as a reactionary form of McCarthyism. Any decent American is going to see through this kind of right-wing propaganda. I just find it has no credibility,” [education professor Peter McLaren] said.

The [Bruin Alumni Association] website also lists history professor Ellen DuBois, saying she “is in every way the modern female academic: militant, impatient, accusatory, and radical — very radical.” In response, DuBois said: “This is a totally abhorrent invitation to students to participate in a witch hunt ... against their professors.”

But DuBois minimized the effect on campus, saying “it’s not even clear this is much other than the ill-considered action of a handful, if that, of individuals.”

Interesting spin. Merely quoting professors and warning potential students (consumers) about what they can expect in certain classrooms is considered “reactionary” “McCarthyism,” “right-wing propaganda” and an “abhorrent” “witch hunt.” I wonder if these professors feel the same way when 60 Minutes or 20/20 exposes the malfeasance of other businesses that are engaged in consumer rip-offs.

[Cross-posted at the On The Fence Films website.]

17 January 2006 @ 12:55PM >> The beauty of socialized medicine is that other people are forced to pay for your whims. In England, if you want a sex change—even if you’re currently in prison for attempted murder—the government will give you one, courtesy of the British taxpayer. But what happens if you decide that you preferred your original gender? No problem, you can go right back. And the taxpayers will pay for that, too.

17 January 2006 @ 4:14AM >> In a celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King day, Ray Nagin, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, chose an odd way to mark the occasion:

Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it’s destroyed and put stress on this country. Surely he doesn’t approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses.

In the 2004 election, many Democrats accused Republicans of injecting God into the political debate. I guess God can be useful to Democrats as well, when used to bash America.

15 January 2006 @ 10:50AM >> Support. Oppose. It seems that the New York Times’s position on wiretaps depends primarily on who occupies the White House.

14 January 2006 @ 1:23PM >> In City Journal, Brian C. Anderson identifies “the most sustained attack on free political speech in the United States since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts.”

If you believe that private citizens should have the right to influence the political process by engaging in political speech, you will find this piece both eye-opening and chilling.

13 January 2006 @ 9:45AM >> It seems al Qaeda has a bit of a P.R. problem in Afghanistan:

Eighty-one percent of Afghans said they think that al-Qaeda is having a negative influence in the world with just 6% saying that it is having a positive influence. An even higher percentage—90%—said they have an unfavorable view of Osama bin Laden, with 75% saying they have a very unfavorable view. Just 5% said they have a favorable view (2% very favorable).

The Taliban isn’t faring much better:

Eighty-eight percent said they have an unfavorable view of the Taliban (62% very unfavorable). Only 8% said they have a favorable view. [...] 82% said that overthrowing the Taliban government was a good thing for Afghanistan, with just 11% saying it was a bad thing.

And while the United States may not be the most popular country in the coffee shops of Europe, the citizens of a nation we freed from tyranny seem to be a bit more happy with us:

Equally large percentages endorse the US military presence in Afghanistan. Eighty-three percent said they have a favorable view of “the US military forces in our country” (39% very favorable). Just 17% have an unfavorable view.
International agencies also get a warm endorsement. An overwhelming 93% gave the United Nations favorable ratings (57% very favorable). International agencies providing aid for reconstruction were rated as effective by 79%, with 38% saying they are very effective.

[...]

This general support for US military presence and for the overthrow of the Taliban government is also reflected in some of the most positive ratings of the United States found in the world. Eighty-one percent said that they have a favorable view of the US (40% very favorable), with just 16% giving an unfavorable rating. In the war zone, one in four (26%) had an unfavorable view of the US, but 73% were favorable.

11 January 2006 @ 7:05PM >> The second podcast in the newly-inaugurated series hosted by the husband-and-wife team of Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith is now online.

Stuart Browning and I were the guests, discussing the digital video revolution and the two film projects we’re working on with our production company On The Fence Films.

You can listen to the podcast at Dr. Helen or Glenn’s website InstaPundit, or you can grab the MP3 file directly.

10 January 2006 @ 3:50AM >> At Slate, Edward Jay Epstein discusses the future of movie distribution and what won’t likely be in it: the Blockbuster rental chain. Interesting timing, because this weekend, I noticed that the Blockbuster store closest to me is now empty and dismantled. That’s the second nearby Blockbuster to close since I moved into this neighborhood, and for all I know, none are left in Manhattan. Four other area video stores closed within the past year as well. And come to think of it, I haven’t seen a new video store open up within the last decade.

When I first moved into my apartment, I joined a local video store and rented some Woody Allen film. On the way to work one day, I went to return the tape. Surprisingly, the video store that I joined just two days earlier was completely gutted. But the drop-slot remained operational, so I put it to use. Down slid the tape case, and falling on the no-longer-carpeted floor, it popped open and the tape tumbled out.

The following day, I walked by the store again and noticed that the building’s roof was missing, as were the internal walls. The floor was covered in debris, but I could still see that Woody Allen tape sitting there on the floor, covered in sunlight and a fresh coat of dust. By the end of the week, the entire building was gone. Who knows where that tape is now...

It looks like the entire brick-and-mortar video rental business will be following the same fate, and maybe soon. We’re witnessing the death of an entire category of retailers. When was the last time that happened?

9 January 2006 @ 1:35PM >> The Republicans campaigned to bring their philosophy of limited government to Washington and pledged to clean House, literally. And they did, for a while, but over time, certain principles seemed to disappear. (Whatever happened to the idea of term limits? Oh yeah, bad for incumbents, so let’s forget about that.) Now that the Republican Party has controlled Congress for over a decade, it seems that they have morphed from the party of limited government into the party of, simply, government. More >>

8 January 2006 @ 9:29PM >> Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and his wife Dr. Helen Smith have begun a podcast series. The inaugural podcast contains interviews with commentator Michelle Malkin and musician Audra Coldiron of Audra and the Antidote.

Earlier today, Stuart Browning and I were interviewed by Glenn and Helen for a future podcast. We discussed the digital video revolution, Internet video distribution, our production company On The Fence Films, Stuart’s short film Dead Meat on the Canadian healthcare system, and the latest developments with our upcoming film Indoctrinate U. That podcast may appear as early as next week. I’ll post a link when it does.

5 January 2006 @ 5:25PM >> The Kelo v. New London decision gave government vastly expanded powers to take your land. But there are other, sneakier ways for the government to seize control of what’s yours:

What do you call it when government takes away the use of private property, but leaves the title in the name of the property owner? The Constitution makes no provision for this function of government, but government is exercising this function with increasing regularity and severity.

[...]

White County, Georgia, is about to adopt a resolution for the “protection of mountains and hillsides,” which will severely restrict how private landowners may use their land. If any owner’s land happens to slope as much as 25 percent, the owner may not use it at all, unless the lot is at least 1.5 acres. Then, he may disturb no more than 30 percent. If he wishes to build a home with a driveway, the total “impervious” area may not exceed 20 percent of the land.

This resolution in White County will empower government to take away the use of 70 percent of the land of a private owner. The owner must continue to pay taxes on 100 percent of the property, but may use only 30 percent.

5 January 2006 @ 9:20AM >> American Enterprise magazine has a review of Brainwashing 201: The Second Semester in the current (January/February 2006) issue. The report is based on the screening of the film at the Liberty Film Festival last fall:

“Fascists have no right to speak!” yelled a left-wing protestor, stomping onto the stage at the premiere of Evan Maloney’s new film, Brainwashing 201. It was a dramatic example of what Maloney’s picture is all about—the lack of fairness on college campuses, where liberal academics turn their classrooms into pulpits for political indoctrination, while conservatives “have no right to speak.”

For those who haven’t been on college campuses recently, Maloney’s documentary is eye opening. Non-left academics are harassed for their political views. Students who show a conservative bent are threatened. Military recruiters are driven off campus.

[...]

Indeed, students in the film express amazement at how left-wing academics manage to wedge politics into nearly every subject. “It’s pretty inventive,” says one. “In geography class I learned that gender is socially constructed,” illustrates another. “I really don’t know why issues such as global warming, globalization, and militarism are brought up in a class in German literature,” puzzles a third student.

[...]

Campuses are supposed to be marketplaces of ideas where issues stand and fall on their merits. Brainwashing 201 demonstrates effectively that this is now far from the case.

4 January 2006 @ 1:50PM >> The factual inaccuracies in the reporting of self-proclaimed economics expert Paul Krugman are so plentiful that an ad-hoc “truth squad” exists online solely to correct his many errors.

You can add Stuart Browning to the ever-expanding list of truth squad members. Stuart—one of the executive producers of my upcoming film Indoctrinate U—is also working on his own project analyzing the Canadian health care system. Last October, he and Blaine Greenberg—my two partners in On The Fence Films—released a short film called Dead Meat on the topic, and more will come later this year.

In his research on health care, Browning is discovering the various tricks that advocates of socialized medicine use to portray Canada as the utopian ideal of health services, an image that Krugman tries to promote when he describes the Canadian model as the “obvious solution” to the perceived shortcomings of our system.

Browning writes:

What Krugman doesn’t say is that its easy to hold down health care costs if you do what Canada does: withhold medical treatment from sick and injured people. The U.S health care system could save billions of dollars if we drastically reduced the number of doctors, hospitals, outpatient clinics, medical devices and diagnostic machines available. If we followed Canada’s lead, we would severely limit each surgeon’s allotted hours in the operating room so that they couldn’t perform too many surgeries. Americans would wait months and years for critical medical tests and treatments - many would suffer greatly, become crippled, addicted to painkillers, go blind or die while waiting - however, the country would spend a lot less money on health care.

Browning then proceeds to administer a fact-based smackdown of Krugman’s spin. It’s a good read if you’re not Paul Krugman. And if you are, you may want to avoid the embarrassment.

4 January 2006 @ 12:51PM >> This one is just too depressing for further comment.

4 January 2006 @ 1:24AM >> Los Angeles homeless advocate Ted Hayes is a Republican. He’s also black. This is problematic, because according to today’s racial politics, you can be black or you can be a Republican, but you can’t attempt to be both without sacrificing your racial identity:

American blacks who are affiliated with the Republican Party are vigorously vilified by Democrats, especially black Democrats. Uncle Tom, sell-out, Oreo—the list of slurs is long.

[...]

We see this across the country. Michael Steele, the lieutenant governor of Maryland and a Republican candidate for the Senate, has been crudely disparaged on racial grounds. A prominent leftist Web site, for instance, depicted him as “Sambo,” among other aspersions. When Condoleezza Rice was nominated as secretary of state, she faced similar treatment: editorial cartoons depicting her as a racial caricature, personalities calling her “Aunt Jemima” on liberal talk radio, and so forth. Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly, Colin Powell, Thomas Sowell and other black conservatives regularly face similar smears.

[...]

It is time for American blacks to have a conversation about the phenomenon of Democrats persecuting black Republicans. Why is this happening? What is it that the Democrats don’t want black folks to understand about Republicans? What is it that the Democrats don’t want black folks to know about Democrats? And how is it that we have come to this point—after having endured so much—where we have ourselves curtailed the freedom of political expression through the threat of retaliatory consequences?

Mr. Hayes knows of what he speaks. His Dome Village homeless shelter will itself be homeless soon. Why? He says it’s because he’s a Republican. As a black homeless advocate, he’s got a lot of nerve being a Republican. More power to him.

3 January 2006 @ 1:48PM >> Is Microsoft helping the Chinese communists suppress speech that they don’t like? It sure sounds that way.

Reporter Rebecca MacKinnon tells the story of Zhao Jing who blogs under the handle “Michael Anti.” MacKinnon notes that “Anti is one of China’s edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptible.” His blog, hosted on Microsoft’s MSN Spaces website, was recently shut down, apparently by Microsoft. So MacKinnon conducted her own tests, and discovered that MSN Spaces is systematically censoring words and removing blogs thought to be threatening to the Chinese regime:

On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make various posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post entries with titles like “Tibet Independence” or “Falun Gong” (a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: “This item includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this item.”

However I was successful in posting blog entries with non-controversial titles, but with politically sensitive words in the text body. For instance, a blog post titled “I love you” had “Tibet independence” in the text body, and a post titled “I am happy” had “Falun Gong” in the body [...]

This was on Friday December 16th. By Monday the 19th, the whole blog had been taken down [...] with an error message: “This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”

Now, It is VERY important to note that the inaccessible blog was moved or removed at the server level and that the blog remains inaccessible from the United States as well as from China. This means that the action was taken NOT by Chinese authorities responsible for filtering and censoring the internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the level of the MSN servers.

2 January 2006 @ 9:36PM >> A rap video spoof by a pair of Saturday Night Live veterans has become something of an Internet hit.

I can see why. It’s funny and different.

And it makes you wonder about the future of broadcast. Tivo and other DVRs give SNL an opportunity to be seen by people who are otherwise not in front of their TVs on a Saturday night, but the Internet got this video in front of people who aren’t in the habit of recording the show in the first place. That’s the way you build an audience.

It’s just another example of the increasingly blurred line between online and broadcast video. Can full-catalog video-on-demand via the Internet be far behind?

2 January 2006 @ 1:26PM >> In times past, the valor of our men and women in uniform was worthy of coverage from the establishment media. Nowadays, the media rarely notices our soldiers unless they can be added to the death count. Leave it to the blogosphere to cover the stories that the establishment media ignores. The website Riehl World View presents 2005: The Year in Military Heroism.